14 DAY TRIAL // As it turns out, polar bears have not been around on our planet for long. On the contrary, recent evidence indicates that this species evolved sometime within the past 500,000 years.
This means that, although their next birthday cake will probably have to be quite big so as to accommodate for all the candles that they have earned over the years, polar bears are not as old as people think them to be.
In a paper published in the journal Cell this May 8, scientists explain that, up until recently, it was believed that the species diverged from brown bears sometime between 600,000 to 5 million years ago.
However, recently uncovered evidence stands as proof that polar bears emerged as a species nearly 500,000 years ago, Nature reports. This makes these animals “remarkably younger” than believed.
The evidence in question is information collected while analyzing and comparing the genetic makeup of polar bears in Greenland and brown bears in Sweden, Finland, Montana, and the islands of Admiralty, Baranof and Chichagof off the coast of Alaska.
According to the researchers who carried out this investigation, the data they collected while studying these animals suggests that polar bears diverged from brown bears about 479,000 and 343,000 years ago.