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Pedals, a beloved American black bear who walked upright and strolled around the suburbs of New Jersey like a Hanna-Barbera cartoon come to life, was believed to have been killed by a hunter last week, animal welfare activists said. His age was not known. Since 2014 residents of Rockaway Township have posted videos online of the bear strolling through their neighborhoods and backyards with admirable posture, his forepaws pulled close to his chest. Many commented that on first glance, Pedals resembled a man wearing a bear suit. But it appears that local celebrity was not enough to save Pedals during...

We just saw the aftermath of a bear attack, so here’s a video showing a hunter scaring off a charging bear. Hunter Franz Albrecht was waiting for a bear to arrive when he got much more than he bargained for. He spots a full-grown sow come running toward the ridge on which he’s hunting, when suddenly two small cubs come trotting into the scene. This is about the worst situation for a hunter. Franz keeps his eye on the bear when it turns on a dime and starts rushing right at him. Instinctively, Franz stands his ground and begins yelling...

Orr said he continued shouting as he had been doing all the way down the trail, but the sow charged him. He deployed bear spray when the animal was 25 feet away, but he said the bear's momentum carried her through the spray and into him. Orr said he dropped to the ground and curled into a ball as the bear bit his arms, shoulder and backpack. "The force of each bite bite was like a sledgehammer with teeth," he wrote in the Facebook post. "She would stop for a few seconds and then bite again. Over and over. After...

Courtesy of the folks at Los Angeles CW affiliate, KTLA, is this video shot by some Pasadena residents of two bears cooling off during a Southern California hot day. The video, submitted by Sainty Wang and Carlos Chavez, was shot from behind a sliding glass door as the cubs splashed around in the birdbath. It’s not uncommon to see bears cooling off in swimming pools as the summer temperatures climb, but these two cubs found the outdoor planter to be a bit more comfortable. The cubs were not unsupervised however, as Wang and Chavez also managed to capture photographs of...

Black bears here, black bears there – black bears everywhere. It does seem that way recently as reports of bears roaming Upstate New York appear to be on the rise. ... this time last year, the DEC's Cortland office received about 10 bear-related calls. This year, there has been 32. We've reached a point where all of (Upstate New York) is bear habitat.

When a young Inuit hunter took aim with his rifle he thought he had spotted a polar bear or an Arctic fox in northern Canada. But the photographs of his kill posted on social media by Didji Ishalook, 25, have sparked feverish interest among scientists and a fascinated public. "They're saying it's a grizzly-polar bear hybrid," he said. Mr Ishalook had actually shot a rare cross between the two species, who normally live in very different climates. Determining whether it is a grolar or a prizzly will have to wait for the results of DNA testing. But its existence adds...

Drew Hamilton was filming bears in Alaska's McNeil River when he got a companion. A brown bear sits next to him while taking in the sites of where all bears were gathering to catch salmon. See the video here. Anybody have bears come this close?

An assistant professor who was mauled by a bear while teaching a mountaineering class is in critical condition. 35-year old, Forest Wagner, was teaching to a group of 12 students on Mount Emmerich near Haines, Alaska, when he was attacked ... Wagner has been teaching in the outdoor studies program at the university's Juneau campus since 2006. ... A second man, 77 year old, Glenn Bohn, was mauled on Friday by a bear. He is recovering from his injuries. Bohn's son-in-law killed the bear during the attack near Mile 68 of Denali Highway.

Stone Age artists were painting red disks, handprints, clublike symbols and geometric patterns on European cave walls long before previously thought, in some cases more than 40,000 years ago, scientists reported Thursday, after completing more reliable dating tests that raised a possibility that Neanderthals were the artists. A more likely situation, the researchers said, is that the art -- 50 samples from 11 caves in northwestern Spain-- was created by anatomically modern humans fairly soon after their arrival in Europe. The findings seem to put an exclamation point to a run of recent discoveries: direct evidence from fossils that Homo...

Last Update: Thursday, September 1, 2005. 3:29pm (AEST) A reconstruction of the face of a young female Neanderthal who lived about 35,000 years ago in France. (AFP) Modern humans, Neanderthals shared earth for 1,000 years New evidence has emerged that Neanderthals co-existed with anatomically modern humans for at least 1,000 years in central France.The finding suggests Neanderthals came to a tragic and lingering end.Few chapters in the rise of Homo sapiens, as modern mankind is known, have triggered as much debate as the fate of the Neanderthals.Smaller and squatter than Homo sapiens but with larger brains, Neanderthals lived in Europe,...

Our ancestors colonised Europe and wiped out their Neanderthal cousins even faster than we thought, says a study published today. Argument has raged for years about whether our ancestors from Africa outsurvived, killed or bred with the Neanderthals, who were stronger, bulkier and shorter but had equally large brains. Now developments in radiocarbon dating suggest that many of the dates published over the past 40 years are likely to underestimate the true ages of the samples. Prof Paul Mellars, of the University of Cambridge, describes today in the journal Nature how better calibration of radiocarbon ages have led to revisions...

Published online: 22 February 2006; | doi:10.1038/news060220-11 Better bone dates reveal bad news for Neanderthals Modern humans took over Europe in just 5,000 years. Michael Hopkin These drawings from the Chauvet cave were originally dated to around 31,000 years ago. But a new analysis pushes that back four or five thousand years. © Nature, with permission from the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. Advances in the science of radiocarbon dating - a common, but oft-maligned palaeontological tool - have narrowed down the overlap between Europe's earliest modern humans and the Neanderthals that preceded them. Refinements to the technique, which...

Humans and Neanderthals, thought to have coexisted for 10,000 years across the whole of Europe, are more likely to have lived at the same time for only 6,000 years, the new study suggests. Scientists believe the two species could have lived side by side at specific sites for periods of only about 2,000 years, but Mellars claims they would have lived in competition at each site for only 1,000 years... Two new studies of stratified radiocarbon in the Cariaco Basin, near Venezuela, and of radiocarbon on fossilized coral formations in the tropical Atlantic and Pacific have given scientists a better...

LONDON — Neanderthals in Europe were killed off by the advance of modern humans thousands of years earlier than previously believed, losing a competition for food and shelter, according to a scientific study published Wednesday. The research uses advances in radiocarbon dating to revise understanding of early humans, suggesting they colonized Europe more rapidly and coexisted for a much shorter period with genetic ancestors. Paul Mellars, professor of prehistory and human evolution at the University of Cambridge and author of the study, said Neanderthals — the species of the Homo genus that lived in Europe and western Asia from around...

Archaeologists have discovered fragments of one of the world's oldest sculptures, a lion-faced figurine estimated at 32,000 years old, from the dirt floor of a cave in southern Germany. The ivory figure, along with a tiny figurine known as the Venus of Hohle Fels, marks the foundation of human artistry. Both were created by a Stone Age European culture that historians call Aurignacian. The Aurignacians appear to have been the first modern humans, with handicrafts, social customs and beliefs. They hunted reindeer, woolly rhinoceros, mammoths and other animals. The Lion-Man sculpture, gradually re-assembled in workshops over decades after the fragments...

There's a cave in France where no humans have been in 26,000 years. The walls are full of fantastic, perfectly-preserved paintings of animals, ending in a chamber full of monsters 1312-feet underground, where CO2 and radon gas concentrations provoke hallucinations. It's called the the Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc Cave, a really weird and mysterious place. The walls contain hundreds of animals—like the typical Paleolithic horses and bisons—but some of them are not supposed to be there, like lions, panthers, rhinos and hyenas. A few are not even supposed to exist, like weird butterflyish animals or chimerical figures half bison half woman. These may...

The cave, declared a UNESCO World Heritage site two years ago, was discovered in the south of France in 1994... Now, scientists have assembled more than 250 radiocarbon dates made from rock art samples, animal bones and the remains of charcoal used by humans... The newly synthesized data suggest the first period of human occupation lasted from 37,000 to 33,500 years ago. The second prehistoric occupation began 31,000 to 28,000 years ago and lasted for 2,000 to 3,000 years, the researchers wrote... The two groups, separated by millenniums, had no connection with each other, they said. The first round of...

Exploring a gorge in south-east France in 1994 for prehistoric artefacts, Jean-Marie Chauvet hit the jackpot. After squeezing through a narrow passage, he found himself in a hidden cavern, the walls of which were covered with paintings of animals. But dating the beautiful images - which featured in Werner Herzog's recent documentary film Cave of Forgotten Dreams - has led to an ugly spat between archaeologists. Could the bones of cave bears settle the debate? Within a year of Chauvet's discovery, radiocarbon dating suggested the images were between 30,000 and 32,000 years old, making them almost twice the age of...

Former Bears coach Mike Ditka, who has repeatedly voiced his support for Donald Trump to the Chicago Sun-Times, blasted President Obama during a radio appearance Thursday."Obama is the worst president we've ever had," Ditka told hosts Sid Rosenberg and Bernard McGuirk during an appearance on their morning show on WABC-AM in New York.Ditka, who guided the 1985 Bears to a Super Bowl victory, questioned Obama’s skills as a leader. "Barack Obama's a fine man. I mean, he's pleasant," Ditka said. "He would be great to play golf with. He's not a leader. This country needs leadership. It needs direction. It...

It is no secret that former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush — the very early GOP presidential favorite — has struggled to catch any traction on the road to the White House. Glenn Beck, though, shared Monday a new “really honorable” theory about why Bush might still be in the running. According to Beck’s theory, Bush knows there is no path to the nomination but is convinced that someone has to stop his biggest rival and No. 1 critic, fellow Republican hopeful Donald Trump. “This would make Jeb one of the most honorable men you could ever imagine. He’s going through...