Description
It is one of the smaller subspecies of brown bears, although brown bears as a group are among the largest type of bears, second only to polar bears. Adult males have skulls measuring approximately 30–40 cm. Fur color is usually very light brown and straw coloured. The hair on the withers is longer with a grey-brown base and is often a different shade then the rest of the body, seen in some individuals as a dark stripe running across the back. Individuals from the middle and Western Caucasus, whose ranges overlap those of Eurasian brown bears, are darker in colour, and larger in size, leading some naturalists to propose that they are in fact hybrid populations of Eurasian and Syrian brown bears. It is thought that these mixed bears originated during the Holocene when Syrian bears migrated Northward and interbred with the larger Northern bears. These populations have skulls measuring 37–40 cm in length, and their fur colour is reddish brown with no mixture of black and brown tones.
Read more about this topic: Syrian Brown Bear
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