Cave Bear Jaw Section with Fang from Romania

Description: A well preserved jaw segment from the Pleistocene of Romania. The enamel on all the teeth is preserved. It’s a wonderful display piece for your collection, or, for decorative purposes.

The Cave Bear (Ursus spelaeus) was a species of bear that lived in Europe during the Pleistocene, going extinct at the beginning of the last glacial maximum some 27,500 years ago. Both the name Cave Bear and the scientific name spelaeus derive from the fact that fossils of this species were mostly found in caves, indicating that this species spent more time in caves than the Brown Bear, which only uses caves for hibernation. Consequently, in the course of time, whole layers of bones, almost entirely those of cave bears, were found in many caves.

The cave bear is thought to have descended from the plio-pleistocene Etruscan bear (Ursus etruscus) through the Deninger's bear (Ursus deningeri) of the Pleistocene half a million years ago. However, Loreille et al. (2001) demonstrate that cave bears split largely before the lineages of brown bears around 1.2 million years ago. Cave bears found in different regions vary in age and evolutionary advancement, thus facilitating investigations into their development. The three anterior premolars were gradually reduced, then disappeared. For the largely vegetarian cave bear, the three premolars of its ancestors became redundant. In a fourth of the skulls found in the Conturines, the third premolar is still present, while the other more evolved specimens elsewhere lack it. The fourth premolar developed into a molar. The last remaining premolar became conjugated with the true molars, enlarging the crown and granting it more cusps and cutting borders. This phenomenon known as molarization improved the mastication capacities of the molars, facilitating the processing of tough vegetation. This allowed the cave bear to gain more energy for hibernation while eating less than its ancestors.