imaginarycircus:

HELLO. I SHALL ADORABLY SLICE YOU IN TWO WITH MY WEE PAWS. I AM BEAR. CHOMP.

Here I was about to correct you, based on the old-school pedantry that “actually, pandas are not bears.” But I was wrong! At least, the first google result for “are pandas bears?” asserts that giant pandas (which this appears to be the adorable baby fun-sized version of) are in fact (drumroll) bears! (Though lesser pandas, of the adorable gif I’ve seen at least 6 times in my Tumblr dash, are indeed more-closely related to raccoons. So chastened pedants can take comfort in that.)

Since genetic sequencing has allowed taxonomists to move beyond morphological similarities to assessing relatedness based on shared DNA, all kinds of comeuppances have been coming up.

So. There it is. What a time to be alive.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/VshR52.

fantasticallyweirdshit:

grawlyx666:

It’s good to know there are some good people left in the world…

<3

The thing that makes it impressive is that messing with bear cubs is the #1 way of getting yourself seriously injured by a bear.

Grizzlies will sometimes rearrange your body parts just because they’re hungry or in a bad mood, but black bears are usually much more civil — unless you mess with their cubs, at which point all bets are off. So the woman in the back of this truck is doing a fairly risky thing.

I was once walking our dog Polo off-trail in the Eastern Sierra when he took off after a bear. And while I waited for Polo to come back I was examining the pile of fresh bear poop that had been left behind (because I’m weird that way). Eventually Polo returned, happy and exhausted and completely uncaring that I was pissed at him for taking off even though I’d been yelling at him not to. So I snapped on his leash and was preparing to move on — when the bear came back.

I could hear it growling and making noises as it pushed through the bushes 100 feet away or so. And for a second I thought, wow, that’s the weirdest thing. Why would the bear come back? So I looked around a little more carefully, and guess what was 30 feet up the trunk of the tree under which we were standing? A cute little baby bear butt, with a head craning around to look at us.

I immediately walked away from the tree with the cub in it. Once I got a couple of hundred feet away, though, I thought I’d stop and sit to watch the bear reunion. In retrospect that was a bad idea.

The mother bear circled around until she’d returned to where the baby was; I couldn’t see her, other than brief glimpses, due to the trees. Then she did an interesting thing. There was a big trunk of a fallen red fir sticking out horizontally from the side of the hillside near the tree with the cub in it. Mama bear walked out onto the trunk of the fallen tree, so she was in full view of us, then raised up on her hind legs and slammed her front paws down onto the trunk several times, making the whole tree shake, while making loud “wow!” noises.

I thought that was an impressive feat of inter-species communication. I continued to think that as Polo and I left the area as quickly as possible.

Reposted from http://ift.tt/1k8tSpB.

h4ilstorm:

Bear (by Scott Grubb)

These images remind me of David Quammen’s book Monster of God. Its premise is that there’s a fundamental difference between a world with wild predators that view humans as prey and sometimes act on that impulse, and a world without them.

I suspect that for a few minutes on June 29, 2012, when Scott Grubb took these photos in Finland, he was distinctly aware of that difference.

Reposted from http://lies.tumblr.com/post/57643101524.