By: Yiling Sun

There was a mammal that lived around 32 million years ago. It had sharp claws. Its fossils were first dug up in 1982. It looked like a huge red raccoon which was actually a bear.

Xiaoming Wang, a vertebrate paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, was part of this project.

“This animal is really telling us a lot of stories,” Wang said.

The strange creature was grouped as a carnivore. It belonged to the arctoids, a group of carnivores that included bears, seals, skunks, raccoons, weasels, and otters.

“It’s a small side branch, but a very important side branch,” Wang said.

Wang’s team scientifically named the mammal—the unscientific name is the dawn bear. The Eoarctos vorax was about two feet long, and it had flat feet with long and sharp claws, allowing it to walk long distances and climb trees, and escape from predators.

The Eoarctos seems to be one of the first carnivores to smash and chew hard objects like bone. In the fossils, archaeologists found broken teeth at the back of the mouth, which probably got infected. Some other Eoarctos probably lost teeth this way as well.

Wang and his team think the animal liked to munch on mollusks, animals with a shell enclosing soft body. The bones of the small prey aren’t likely to break the mammal’s teeth, so Wang thinks that the dawn bear may have eaten fruit with hard seeds.

This creature suffered wounds and double jaw pain a few months before death.

“[It] certainly made a huge contribution to science,” Wang said.

The dawn bear is a fierce creature, and luckily it is extinct, otherwise humans could die from it.