Chasing the Ghost Bear: On the Trail of America's Lost Super Beast by Mike Stark

Author:Mike Stark [Stark, Mike]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: NAT003000 Nature / Animals / Bears, SCI054000 Science / Paleontology, NAT015000 Nature / Fossils
Publisher: Bison Books

PART 4

North and South

17

Fitful Arrivals

These days, if you’re a paleontologist digging in a hole and think you might’ve stumbled upon the remains of a giant short-faced bear, the first person you’re likely to call is Blaine Schubert. A native of the Ozarks, Schubert today is a professor at East Tennessee State University and director of the Center of Excellence in Paleontology. He’s also an expert in the Pleistocene—and a deep expert on these long-gone bears. “Arctodus is one of my favorite animals,” he told me. “They’re amazing, terrifying, and mysterious.”

There’s a line you can draw about our knowledge of giant short-faced bears that starts with E. D. Cope and his initial work describing the first discoveries, then passes through the University of California’s John Merriam and those looking at La Brea’s earliest excavations in the early twentieth century, followed by Finland’s Björn Kurtén’s work in the 1960s and 1970s, and finally to Schubert in recent decades. Many others have contributed along the way—that’s one of the beautiful things about science and discovery—but these scientists have provided foundational knowledge that we return to time and again to understand and challenge what we think we know about this great bear. Today Schubert can easily rattle off details of coast-to-coast bear discoveries and offer nuanced answers about what’s known and not known about short-faced bears. Like the others before him, he loves the gritty details of precision analyses and measurements alongside the imaginative side of paleontology—trying to figure out what the days were like for Arctodus, what they ate, how and even where they slept.

But each of those scientists had to start somewhere, and for Schubert the beginning came with an email, a grueling cave expedition in the Ozarks, and a kneecap.

In December 1998 Schubert was working at the Illinois State Museum and got an email from a caver friend, James Kaufmann, a student at the University of Missouri at Rolla. Kaufmann and other members of the school’s spelunking club had been mapping a vast cave in Missouri’s Pulaski County. Far inside, caver Andy Free had found the big bones of what Kaufmann suspected was an Ice Age species. It certainly could’ve been a cow or something else quite ordinary, Schubert thought, but what if it wasn’t?

A month after the email, Schubert, Kaufmann, and a crew climbed to the entrance of the cave perched high on a bluff above the Gasconade River, a twisty strip of mountain runoff flowing through hardwood forests and along tall cliffs and brushy banks. Despite its seventy-five-foot-wide opening and high ceiling, the cave narrowed into a three-foot-tall crawlway that went on and on. Several trunks veered off to different rooms and still more cramped and twisting hallways. Cavers estimate that the underground network of byzantine passages totals more than four miles. Once inside, the trip was frigid, wet, muddy, and dark, but Schubert loves being underground. He had grown up caving in the Ozarks and elsewhere but still shivers at the memory of the trips to the bear site above the Gasconade.

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