Polar-grizzly bear a wild find

[StoneMtn]

It's unfortunate that humans are always so typically human. We confirm things can exist and live by finding and killing them.

Polar-grizzly bear a wild find

Beth Duff-Brown / Associated Press

TORONTO -- A DNA test has confirmed what zoologists, hunters and aboriginal trackers in the far northern reaches of Canada have dreamed of for years: the first documented case of a grizzly-polar bear in the wild.

Roger Kuptana, an Inuit tracker from the Northwest Territories, suspected the American hunter he was guiding had shot a hybrid bear after noticing its white fur was spotted brown and it had the long claws and slightly humped back of a grizzly.

Territorial officials seized the bear's body and a DNA test from Wildlife Genetics International, a lab in British Columbia, confirmed the hybrid was born of a polar bear mother and grizzly father.

"It's something we've all known was theoretically possible because their habitats overlap a little bit and their breeding seasons overlap a little bit," said Ian Stirling, a biologist with the Canadian Wildlife Service in Edmonton, Alberta.

Stirling said polar bears and grizzlies have been successfully paired in zoos and that their offspring are fertile, but there had been no documented case in the wild.

He said the first person to realize something was different about the bear -- shot and killed last month on the southern end of Banks Island in the Beaufort Sea -- was Kuptana, the guide.

"These guides know their animals and they recognized that there were a number of things that didn't look quite right for a polar bear," Stirling told the Associated Press. The bear's eyes were ringed with black, its face was slightly indented and it had a mild hump to its back and long claws.

Kuptana, from Sachs Harbour in the Northwest Territories, was tracking with an Idaho big-game hunter, who paid $45,450 for a license to hunt polar bears.

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[payce-ley]

crafty mother nature's answer to polar bears facing extinction as their natural habitat melts

[Dr_Evil_Mouse]

We confirm things can exist and live by finding and killing them.

How painfully true - kind of like that old saw about Americans only learning geography when they invade other countries.