Polar bear's ancestor is Irish brown bear, study finds

[xchrom]

http://www.latimes.com/news/science/la-sci-polar-bears-20110708,0,6814607.story


A polar bear outside Churchill, Canada (Paul J. Richards, AFP/Getty Images)


All polar bears alive today are descended from a female brown bear that most likely hailed not from Alaska, as widely presumed, but from Ireland, scientists said.

The discovery, reported online Thursday in the journal Current Biology, suggests that polar bears and various species of brown bears probably encountered each other many times over the last 100,000 years or so as climate change forced them into each other's territory. On some occasions, those meetings produced hybrid offspring whose genetic signature lives on in polar bears today.

The findings were made by analyzing the mitochondrial DNA extracted from 242 bear lineages. Some of them were polar bears and some were brown bears. Some lived recently and others have been dead since the late Pleistocene, which ended nearly 12,000 years ago.

[dipsydoodle]

1. Did they find Guinness in the dna ?

Maybe penquins are Irish too ? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sfOlH4LOxFw

[xchrom]

2. that. is. brilliant! nt

[dipsydoodle]

3. Its an age thing

I can remember Guinness adverts right back to the fifties. :)

:hi:

[xchrom]

4. beer adverts are the best.

& guiness sticks out like old french adverts do.