History of Cave Bear Discoveries
Cave bear skeletons were first described in 1774 by Johann Friederich Esper in his book Newly Discovered Zoolites of Unknown Four Footed Animals. Originally thought to belong to dragons, unicorns, apes, canids or felids, Esper postulated they actually belonged to polar bears. Twenty years later, Johann Christian Rosenmüller, an anatomist at the Leipzig University, gave the species its binomial name. The bones were so numerous, most researchers held little respect for them. During World War I, large amounts of cave bear bones were used as a source of phosphates, leaving behind little more than skulls and leg bones.
Many caves in Central Europe have skeletons of cave bears inside, for example the Heinrichshöhle in Hemer or the Dechenhöhle in Iserlohn, Germany. In Romania, in a cave called Bears' Cave, 140 cave bear skeletons were discovered in 1983.
Read more about this topic: Cave Bear
Famous quotes containing the words history of, history, cave, bear and/or discoveries:
“When the history of guilt is written, parents who refuse their children money will be right up there in the Top Ten.”
—Erma Brombeck (20th century)
“While the Republic has already acquired a history world-wide, America is still unsettled and unexplored. Like the English in New Holland, we live only on the shores of a continent even yet, and hardly know where the rivers come from which float our navy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“Stands the Spring! heralded by its bright-clothed
Trumpeters, of bough and bush and branch;
Pale Winter draws away his white hands, loathed,
And creeps, a leper, to the cave of time.”
—Philip Larkin (1922–1986)
“To turn away a guest is poorest poverty;
To bear with fools is mightiest might.”
—Tiruvalluvar (c. 5th century A.D.)
“It is remarkable what a value is still put upon wood even in this age and in this new country, a value more permanent and universal than that of gold. After all our discoveries and inventions no man will go by a pile of wood. It is as precious to us as it was to our Saxon and Norman ancestors. If they made their bows of it, we make our gun-stocks of it.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)