What is here today can be gone tomorrow. Every life is a miracle, every life deserves a second chance.
- Gail Martin -
Trivial but True
Advertisers capitalize on the lure of bears. In 1993, Coca-Cola brought polar bears into the homes of millions of people around the world in a commercial, “Northern Lights”
in which polar bears drink coke and view the northern lights. There have been many polar bear spots since the 1993 debut, including, one ad that shows polar bears partying with penguins at an Arctic beach party. However, in reality, they live on opposite poles: penguins live in the Antarctic and polar bears live in the Arctic.
Are there bears in jail?
Yup, in Churchill, Manitoba, Canada.
Officially, the building was once a morgue
on a former military base, but now it’s being used to keep up to twenty-three polar bears alive at a time!
In the past, many polar bears were killed
if they came too close to the town of Churchill.
Now they’re kept in the “Polar Bear Jail”
during the late fall until the pack ice freezes, then released to join their brethren
in Hudson Bay, for the seal hunt.
What’s Named after a Bear, but Looks Like a Raccoon?
It’s the red panda, but it’s neither a bear or a raccoon.
The red panda has its own independent family in the scientific classification system, called Ailuridae, whereas the bear
is classified as an Ursidae.
The taxonomic classification of both the red panda and giant panda has actually been a subject of debate for many decades, as both species share characteristics of bears and raccoons.
While the red panda and giant panda share the same name, they are only very distantly related by remote common ancestry from the Early Tertiary Period.
Its common ancestor can be traced back tens of millions
of years. Fossils of the red panda have been unearthed from China in the east to Britain
in the west and most recently a handful of fossils have also been discovered in North America.
By Sylvia Dolson
Photos: Unsplash
