Publication Date:
2004-11-13
Description:
Current biogeographic models hypothesize that brown bears migrated from Asia to the New World ~100 to 50 thousand years ago but did not reach areas south of Beringia until ~13 to 12 thousand years ago, after the opening of a mid-continental ice-free corridor. We report a 26-thousand-year-old brown bear fossil from central Alberta, well south of Beringia. Mitochondrial DNA recovered from the specimen shows that it belongs to the same clade of bears inhabiting southern Canada and the northern United States today and that modern brown bears in this region are probably descended from populations that persisted south of the southern glacial margin during the Last Glacial Maximum.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Notes: 〈/span〉Matheus, Paul -- Burns, James -- Weinstock, Jaco -- Hofreiter, Michael -- New York, N.Y. -- Science. 2004 Nov 12;306(5699):1150.〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Author address: 〈/span〉Alaska Quaternary Center, University of Alaska Fairbanks, Fairbanks, AK, USA. ffpem1@uaf.edu〈br /〉〈span class="detail_caption"〉Record origin:〈/span〉 〈a href="http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/15539594" target="_blank"〉PubMed〈/a〉
Keywords:
Alaska
;
Animal Migration
;
Animals
;
DNA, Mitochondrial/analysis
;
*Fossils
;
Skull
;
Time
;
*Ursidae/classification/genetics
;
Yukon Territory
Print ISSN:
0036-8075
Electronic ISSN:
1095-9203
Topics:
Biology
,
Chemistry and Pharmacology
,
Computer Science
,
Medicine
,
Natural Sciences in General
,
Physics
Permalink
