The Great North-American Short-Faced Bear






Back in the third grade, I discovered, during inside recess, a slim paperback book called Animal Ghosts, published by the Walt Disney company. It contained a series of very brief, very fascinating pieces about animals, the vast majority of them prehistoric. 

Though I didn't know it at the time, the above "mystery monster" shown above killing a moose was the famed North American short-faced bear. I just assumed it must be the cavebear whose scientific I already knew was actually Ursus Spleleaus.

Looking back, though, I realized what the creature above must really have been. It looks more like a short-face after all, and since purchasing the above copy on ebay, I recognize that the name tremarctus (or more properly Arctodus) does refer to the short-faced bear. The Inopinatus is a legendary Indian creature, though. Could the arctodus, or short-face, have survived the Plesticene, or somehow inspired the legend? We probably won't know, unless a living specimen turns up! But the arctodus could probably really kill a moose with a single swipe!

It must have been about fifth grade, when I found out from Our Continent, just what the short-faced bear really was, which, when I first saw a labeled picture, assumed was a smallish creature like a modern sun bear, "dwarfed  Kodiaks" and was "native in origin". I eventually came to realize what the short-face was truly like-- that it was long-limbed, fast and able to run down prey. And unlike the cavebear of ice-age Europe which was even believed to be primarily an herbivore, "shortie" was thought to be a flesh eater and hunter of large game! A better name for him would have been the Terror Bear, and it's doubtful the first Clovis hunters to reach here from Asia were contemplating the shortness of the creature's muzzle while running for their lives!

One book I own on bears of the world opins that the colonization of North America might have proved impossible because of the presence of this great, flesh-eating bear. Cooking fires would have been iresistable to him, and no hut would have been safe at night! Only after the extinction of this giant could the continent been safe for colonization. 

This I find a bit dubious however, as fire could be used to drive nearly anything off. Even the mighty short-face would have learned to fear man. More likely, the bear died out, like the other giant carnivora, once humans killed off the megafauna.


Jay Matternes depictions of the extinct mega fauna of North America, some in comparison with surviving species, in Vanishing Wildlife of North America, National Geographic publications 1974. The Arctodus is depicted with facial markings similar to its only extant relative the Peruvian spectacled bear

More disapointingly though, recently scientists have theorized that the bear was not an active hunter as previously supposed. It may have been primarily a giant scavenger, which used its giant size to frighten other carnivores away from kills. The same has been said in regard to T-rex, though in that case this has virtually been disproven. The jury's still out for "shortie" though. 

But whatever the case, "shortie" was among the largest carnivorous mammals ever to have existed on earth, reviled only by the giant creodonts and condylarths of the Eocene, and the similarly sized agriotherium of Africa. 

I recently got to see a skeleton of one at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago, in the ice-age section of its evolution of Life hall.  The museum also does, or did, have a traveling exhibit on prehistoric elephants, which includes two ice-age predators: a homotherium saber-tooth, and full-sized Arctodus. "Shortie" is very aptly misnamed. 


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