Ancestry of Polar Bears Traced to Ireland (3 of 3) (IMAGE)
Caption
An international team of scientists has discovered that the female ancestor of all living polar bears was a brown bear that lived in the vicinity of present-day Britain and Ireland just prior to the peak of the last ice age -- 20,000 to 50,000 years ago. The research is expected to help guide future conservation efforts for polar bears, which are listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act. The research team analyzed 242 brown-bear and polar-bear mitochondrial-DNA lineages.
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Daniel J. Cox/NaturalExposures.com
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