It all started with a fossil. “We have this polar bear jawbone
from the Svalbard archipelago in the North Atlantic,” says
Charlotte Lindqvist, a professor at SUNY Buffalo and lead author
of a landmark new study into the history of polar bears.
Lindqvist, along with researchers from over two dozen
institutions, assembled the ancient polar bear’s genome from
this 130,000 year old bone. As one of the oldest polar bear
remains ever found, this toothless facial fossil opened a window
for scientists to guess how the animal survived past periods of
climate change. The study, published earlier this week in the
journal Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, also
determined the polar bears species to be about four to five
million years old–-more than seven times older than previously
thought. Another study published in Science in April pegged the
age of the species at just 600,000 years. This fossil also
showed a strong genetic link between polar bears and brown
bears, resulting from intermingling as recent a