Bear Lesson I

There is a lot of inaccurate nonsense floating around about bears. Being a biologist by education and liking things proper, I thought I would do an infomercial today on the classification of the brown bear.

Of the 8 bear species that make up the family Ursidae, brown bears have the widest distribution. Ursus arctos is called ‘grizzly’ if it lives inland and ‘brown bear’ if it lives near the coast. This is an artificial separation. In the 1960s bear hunters pressured The Boone and Crockett Club into this distinction to allow hunters inland to have ‘grizzlies’. So grizzly is but one of several forms of brown bear.
Grizzly bears are all inland brown bears, but not all inland brown bears are grizzled.
Brown bears come in many shades of colour.
But hunters aren’t the only ones responsible for confusion. Prior to 1960 there were all sorts of ‘species’ of brown bear. Then in 1962 a Dr. Raucsch concluded that all brown bears were one species, Ursus arctos.
The Kodiak brown bear became a subspecies, U. a.middendorffi.
All other brown bears were assigned to U. a. horribilis.

There are no specific animals such as the grizzly bear, Alaska brown bear, tundra bear etc.

Thus endeth the lesson.