Cave bear

The cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) is a prehistoric species of bear that lived in Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene and became extinct about 24,000 years ago during the Last Glacial Maximum. Both the word cave and the scientific name spelaeus are used because fossils of this species were mostly found in caves. This reflects the views of experts that cave bears may have spent more time in caves than the brown bear, which uses caves only for hibernation. It is thought to have been largely herbivorous. Cave bear skeletons were first described in 1774 by Johann Friedrich Esper, in his book Newly Discovered Zoolites of Unknown Four Footed Animals. While scientists at the time considered that the skeletons could belong to apes, canids, felids, or even dragons or unicorns, Esper postulated that they actually belonged to polar bears. Twenty years later, Johann Christian Rosenmüller, an anatomist at Leipzig University, gave the species its binomial name. The bones were so numerous that most researchers had little regard for them. During World War I, with the scarcity of phosphate dung, earth from the caves where cave bear bones occurred was used as a source of phosphates. When the "dragon caves" in Austria’s Styria region were exploited for this purpose, only the skulls and leg bones were kept. Many caves in Central Europe have skeletons of cave bears inside, such as the Heinrichshöhle in Hemer and the Dechenhöhle in Iserlohn, Germany. A complete skeleton, five complete skulls, and 18 other bones were found inside Kletno Bear Cave, in 1966 in Poland. In Romania, in a cave called Bears' Cave, 140 cave bear skeletons were discovered in 1983. Cave bear bones are found in several caves in the country of Georgia. In 2021, Akaki Tsereteli State University's students and a lecturer discovered two complete cave bear skulls, with molars, canines, humerus, three vertebrae and other bones, in a previously unexplored cave. Both the cave bear and the brown bear are thought to be descended from the Plio-Pleistocene Etruscan bear (Ursus etruscus) that lived about 5.