Primitive fossil bear with a sweet tooth identified from Canada’s High Arctic

Researchers from the Canadian Museum of Nature and the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County have identified remains of a 3.5-million-year-old bear from a fossil-rich site in Canada’s High Arctic. Their study shows not only that the animal is a close relative of the ancestor of modern bears—tracing its ancestry to extinct bears of similar age from East Asia—but that it also had a sweet tooth, as determined by cavities in the teeth.