By: Matthew Yang

In 1982, a team of paleontologists led by Robert Emry found the complete skeleton of a bear with broken teeth at the Fitterer Ranch in North Dakota.

The bear lived around 30 million years ago and belonged to the arctoids, a group of animals closely related to dogs. The animal had broken teeth on both sides of its jaw, and some of them were missing altogether. This indicates that the bear ate something very hard.

Xiaoming Wang, a vertebrate paleontologist, and his team named the bear Eoarctos Vorax, which means “Voracious Dawn Bear” in Greek. The bear had sharp claws and was about two feet long. A study by Dr. Wang’s team suggested that the bear had a dangerous appetite for crunching mollusks.

“They must have been eating very hard things,” said Blaire Van Valkenburgh, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of California, Los Angles. Since eating shellfish wouldn’t cause that much damage to its teeth, Dr. Van Valkenburgh theorizes that the bear ate a lot of fruit with very hard pits.

Large snails are very common in the area surrounding Fitterer Ranch. The bear had unhealed bone infections in its mouth, which suggests that it ate hard things routinely. Clint Boyd, a North Dakota paleontologist, thinks that the bear was munching on snails.

This bear could have eaten a lot of hard things that broke its teeth. The exact reason will not be known for sure until researchers uncover more details about its history.

Sources:

A ‘kitten-otter-bear’? Untangling the identity of a very strange skeletonNational Geographic

A Bear That Looked Like a Raccoon and Had a Dangerous Appetite, The New York Times