[Fractal Trader]

They call it a “meat eater”. Outside of Polar Bears, most bears that I am familiar with are quite omnivorous, and enjoy their huckleberries and honey greatly.

[ClearCase_guy]

I believe the short-faced bears may have been carrion eaters. The thinking is that they had a highly developed sense of smell -- typical in those animals that ate rotting meat. The benefit of their large size was to scare off other carrion eaters from a food source.

But I think this stuff generally falls into the area of "unsubstantiated guesswork".

[kitchen]

Starving bears eat two men in Russia
KTRK-TV Houston, TX
Wednesday, July 23, 2008

MOSCOW, Russia -- A pack of enormous bears searching for food killed and ate two men at mines in Russia's Pacific Kamchatka region and have kept hundreds of geologists and miners from reaching the mine, news agencies reported Wednesday.

A pack of up to 30 Kamchatka bears -- which are similar to grizzlies -- prowled around two mines of a local platinum mining company where they killed the two guards on Thursday, local officials were quoted by the Russian ITAR-Tass news agency as saying.

About 400 company workers have refused to return to the mines for fear of the bears, which stand 10 feet (three meters) tall on their hind legs and weigh up to 1,500 pounds (700 kilograms), Interfax reported.

(snip)

Actually, the Kamchatka bear is a variety of brown bear (not grizzly), usually larger and heavier that the North American variety.

[Boogieman]

These bears were different. I believe they concluded they must have been mainly meat eaters, becasue they couldn’t sustain that size in that ecosystem without eating a lot of meat.

[Rebelbase]