Mystery of extinct vegetarian cave bear diet – ScienceDaily

Up to now, very little is known about the dietary evolution of the cave bear and how it became a vegetarian, such as the fossils of the direct ancestor, l & rsquo; Deninger's bear ( Ursus deningeri ), are extremely rare.

However, an article published in the journal Historical Biology sheds new light on this subject. A research team from Germany and Spain found that Deninger's bear probably had a diet similar to that of its descendant – the classic cave bear – as a new analysis shows a distinct morphology in the skull, mandible and teeth.

To understand the evolution of the cave bear lineage, researchers analyzed rare fossils and digitally removed sediments in order not to risk damaging the fossils. Using sophisticated statistical methods, called geometric morphometry, the researchers compared the three-dimensional shape of the mandibles and skull of Deninger's bear with that of the classic cave bears and modern bears

"The analyzes showed that Deninger's bear had very similar shapes and skull to classic cave bear, "says Anneke van Heteren, lead author of the study and head of the Mammalogy section at the Zoology Collection. from the state of Bavaria.This implies that they were adapted to the same types of food and were predominantly vegetarian.

"There is an ongoing discussion about the extent to which l & # 39; Classic cave bear was a vegetarian, and that is why the new feed information of his direct ancestor is so important because it teaches us that a differentiation between the diet d The cave bears and brown bears were already established 500 thousand years ago and probably earlier, "explains Mikel Arlegi, a PhD student at the Universities of the Basque Country. It is interesting to note that the researchers also found differences in Deninger bears from the Iberian Peninsula and those from the rest of Europe, which are probably not related to food.

They proposed three possibilities to explain these differences: 1) Iberian bears are chronologically younger than others, 2) the Pyrenees, acting as a natural barrier, have led to differentiation between Iberian bears and those of the rest from Europe, 3) there were multiple lineages, either one leading to the classic cave bear, or each lineage leading to a different group of cave bears. "Asier Gómez-Olivencia, researcher of Ikerbasque at the University of the Basque Country said:

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