Brown bear
Ursus arctos
— Where the name comes from
The scientific name is a bilingual tautology: ursus is “bear” in Latin, arctos is “bear” in Greek (árktos, the same word that names the Arctic, the land beneath the constellation of the Bear). Literally: “bear bear”.
— Facts
- Group
- Mammals · Mammalia
- Order
- Carnivores
- Habitat
- Forest, tundra, alpine meadows
- Range
- Eurasia and North America; in Italy in the central Alps and in Abruzzo
- Size
- 150–280 cm, 100–600 kg depending on the subspecies
- Diet
- Omnivore — mostly roots, fruit, insects, fish
- Lifespan
- 20–30 years
— Characteristics
- 01
An opportunistic omnivore: meat is often a minor fraction of the diet.
- 02
Through winter dormancy it neither urinates nor defecates for months, recycling urea into protein.
- 03
Its sense of smell is reckoned thousands of times keener than ours.
— What sets it apart
In hibernation the bear loses fat but almost no muscle mass and no bone density, despite months of complete stillness. An astronaut in orbit, or a bedridden patient, would deteriorate far faster. Working out how it does this is now a genuine line of biomedical research.
