Jason E. Andersen

Bonus Fun Fact: Worldwide, there are only eight species of bear, and none of them are grizzlies.

When talking about worldwide numbers of species, I tend to expect numbers much larger than I would guess on my own. Such as, there are more than 10,000 species of birds and likely more than 350,000 species of beetles. Given all that I don’t know about bears, I would have guessed a number of species in the high 20’s. Nope, there’s only 8.

Here’s a list of bear species:

Giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca)
Spectacled bear (Tremarctos ornatus)
Sun bear (Helarctos malayanus)
Sloth bear (Melursus ursinus)
Asian black bear (Ursus thibetanus)
American black bear (Ursus americanus)
Brown bear (Ursus arctos)
Polar bear (Ursus maritimus)

But, what about grizzly bears, you may ask? The king of bears that graced the National Geographic covers of my youth? They are Brown bears. Grizzly bears, along with California grizzlies and Kodiaks, are all Brown bears. The lumpers and splitters may argue about them being subspecies or not, but they are all firmly Ursus arctos.

This all stems from me listening to an episode of the Ologies Podcast featuring Chris Morgan, a bear biologist of some renown. It was really interesting and I encourage you to check it out for yourself. In general, the Ologies series is excellent and you are guaranteed to learn a lot about topics that you maybe didn’t even know existed.

Here’s two more snippets from the podcast that I really got a kick out of:

Bonus Bonus Fun Fact: ‘Ursus’ is Ancient Greek for bear and ‘arctos’ comes from ‘arktos’ in Latin, which also means bear. So Brown bears, Ursus arctos, are ‘bear bears.’

Bonus Bonus Bonus Fun Fact: The Arctic, our northern polar region, is named thus because there are bears there (Polar bears) and Antarctica, which has no bears. Just kidding, that’s not true. Although the bear no-bear relationship works with their names, the poles are named that way because the Arctic faces the constellations of Ursa Major (the Big Dipper) and Ursa Minor (the Little Dipper and the North Star, Polaris) while the Antarctic faces away. Nice try, bears.

But what about Koala bears (!?), I wondered.

Bonus Bonus Bonus Bonus Fun Fact: Koala bears aren’t ‘bears’ at all. They are more closely related to kangaroos. That’s the fun of common names!