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WAKARUSA, IND. More than 50 years after Gale Sayers, the “Kansas Comet,” inspired awe as a Jayhawk, he was honored in January in Topeka by the Native Sons and Daughters of Kansas as one of its Kansans of the Year. At a table near the front, Sayers was seated next to his wife, Ardythe, as a mesmerizing KU-produced tribute played. ************ But Ardie Sayers has come to believe its onset was years before that — possibly even as far back as when he returned to Kansas in a fund-raising capacity for a time in 2009. While she considers Sayers, 73,...

Aboriginal hunters from Arctic Canada have a couple of names for what they say is an extremely rare polar bear that is huge, narrow-bodied, fast-moving and lithe: "tiriarnaq" or "tigiaqpak," meaning "weasel bear." Now the thawing and rapidly eroding Chukchi Sea coastal permafrost has produced evidence that one of these legendary weasel bears — or some other strange kind of bear — roamed Arctic Alaska centuries ago. A huge, fully intact and unusually shaped polar bear skull emerged in 2014 from an eroding archaeological site about 13 miles southwest of Utqiaġvik (Barrow). It is one of the biggest polar bear...

Some wildlife activists and Banff business owners are voicing disappointment over recently released results of a $1-million, five-year study into bear deaths on train tracks in mountain national parks. Jim Pissot of WildCanada Conservation Alliance, says the recommendations to create alternative habitat and escape routes, manage vegetation, install early warning systems and electric mats ignore one glaring reason grizzlies are attracted to the tracks — spilled grain from rail cars. “Bizarrely, after six years of study, Parks Canada and Canadian Pacific have blamed the bears,” said Pissot. “They are determined that the bears, wolves and other wildlife must change their...

A Framingham middle school student was hospitalized Monday after he and another student ate a marijuana edible on the school bus, according to a letter released by Fuller Middle School. School officials are trying to find out who brought the edibles on the bus and how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. Stacy Velasquez says her 12-year-old son was riding the bus to school Monday morning when he found a container of gummy bears that got him very sick.

Would you this to your co-workers? Bear! Or not. With friends like these, who needs enemies? Sometimes office teasing goes a little beyond "Go pick up a bottle of elbow grease" or "See if you can find me the level straightener", and delves into the pre-planned pranking. case in point: The "bear" milling around outside! On a construction site, seeing a bear probably isn’t all that far from the realm of possibility. I've never been one to tease somebody for having a functioning Fight or Flight reflex, though. What do you think? Seen or done any good pranks lately? I'm...

A video of an enormous polar bear in Canada gingerly patting a chained sled dog hit the Internet last week and quickly went viral. The Huffington Post lauded its “cuteness factor.” The man who shot the video praised the bear for showing “that kind of heart toward another animal.” But reality soon intervened. Canada’s CBC News reported that officials had removed three polar bears from the same property in Churchill after one killed and ate another dog. The owner of the site, who raises the sled dogs, told the network that the slaughter had occurred on “the only day we...

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...