Giant Short Faced Bear
The Giant Short Faced Bear is believed to be the largest bear that ever existed.
It would have toad about 5 feet tall at the shoulder and been the proud possessor of the strongest most powerful jaws that had ever been seen.
Giant Short Faced Bear
Frightening to say the very least.
IT would be about 9 or ten feet when standing on its well muscled hind legs and weigh in at an amazing 16 to 17 HUNDRED pounds.
The giant short-faced bear seems to have been a very big bear. Compared to those which live now, it would have much longer legs and a much wider mouth.
It had a very broad flat face and a very powerful means to bite. Long ago it lived in North America, where the United States is now.
They lived in the areas of open ground during the ice ages in North America from the tundra far into the grassy lands in the south.
It was a carnivore, which means it ate meat, and was also probably a scavenger as well as killing its own prey.
Giant short faced bears went extinct about 12 thousand years ago.
Scientists consider it likely that it was the ancestor of the Specatacled Bear of today.
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According to Dinosaur Secrets, History channel, 23 Feb 2011. The short faced bear stood 12 feet to the shoulder and was in excess of 15ft in length. Considering how things were so over sized I feel that their dimensions are more accurate as the dimensions given here are no bigger than a polar bear of today.
If 10,000 y/a, These GSFB’S walked the land with such mass and height.Isn’t it possible, 1,000,000 y/a, Bears were even larger?Also where does man fit in this picture?is it possible that human beings grew to great sizes, in order to defend themselves, against such huge and dangerous animals.The air quality was greater and cleaner than today.This is fascinating.
Yes many species of bears were even larger just a few hundred years ago, with enough food and land area bears could have reached the very maximum of biophysical limits. Some claw marks 15 – 19 ft high exist in riverbluff cave, Missouri indicating 12 – 16 ft bears, maybe bigger. They could peer through your 2nd story kitchen window! Fossil teratornis bones also show the birds grew massive in some instances. They found their bones in woodburn, Oregon in 2002, a indicating a 14-16 ft wing span, the strata was 10,800 yrs old. 18 -20 ft teratornis incredibilis may also have lingered into the late pleistocene or later, and of course Argentavis with it’s 25 ft wingspan.
Some humans too could also have grown much taller, wider, and stronger than modern folk. Multiple Cro-Magnon males have been unearthed in Italy which were just under 7 feet tall with 1700 cc brains. The bones of Homo Heidelberg man in Africa indicate they regularly exceeded 7 feet, and Prof. Lee Berger has called them “giants.” As far back as 1940 Von Koenigswald and Weidenreich proclaimed that the mankind’s earliest ancestors were 8 to 10 foot tall giants, and descended from Meganthropus and Gigantopithecus. With the thousands of news reports of alleged giant skeletons in the 19th to early 20th century, one wonders if the “giant of Castelnau” was not alone in ancient times…
But I think the largest Kodiaks and grizzly bears might have exceeded 12, 13 maybe 14 feet in the past, in rare cases. Some old records on Wrangle Island and Kodiak island have 1st and 3rd hand measurements of skins and bones of freshly killed specimens which 100 years ago would have made some of our biggest bears look elegant and dwarfish in comparison. there were like 100,000 grizzly bears in N. America at one time, now there are like 500 or 900. So we probably had some real monsters just a century ago.