Paleontologists have discovered a set of ancient bear footprints in Honseca Cave, northern Spain. Although distinguishing cave bear from brown bear tracks is complex, cave bears are considered the most likely tracemakers in Honseca.
Cave bears (Ursus spelaeus) were a very large type of bear that formed the sister lineage of living brown bears and polar bears.
These animals lived in Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene epoch and became extinct about 24,000 years ago.
They were 2.7-3.5 m (8.9-11.5 feet) long and up to 1.7 m (5.6 feet) at the shoulder, and weighed between 225 and 500 kg.
Cave bears and people likely encountered one another occasionally.
Despite their name, they didn’t actually live in caves but only used them for hibernation.
The massive grinding molars and nitrogen-isotope data from its bones indicate that cave bears were primarily herbivorous, with foliage their main dietary staple.
“Cave bear tracks are not uncommon in the soft sediments of the caves of the Iberian Peninsula and many speleologists are familiar with their presence,” said Dr. Ana Mateos from the Centro Nacional de Investigación sobre la Evolución Humana (CENIEH).
“However, until now these fossil traces had not been the subject of systematic research.”
“In fact, to date only one study of this type was carried out in Urşilor Cave in Romania.”
Dr. Mateos and colleagues discovered a set of 16 cave bear footprints in Honseca Cave, Palencia, Spain.
The footprints were assigned to Ursichnus europaeus and represent the first record of this ichnospecies from a cave in the Iberian Peninsula.
“We carried out a scan of the surface with the footprints and its immediate surroundings with a laser scanner that creates a three-dimensional cloud of millions of points and we combined it with a model obtained by photogrammetry,” said Dr. Adrián Martinez, a technician at CENIEH.
“This model has been used to take different measurements of the footprints and compare them…
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