[blam]

"the brown bear extinction referred to may be (probably) the short-faced bear, which (if it were around) would make the grizzly run for its mommy. :') "

I think so.

At the end of the last Ice Age (just yesterday in geological time), camels, bisons, mammoths, lions, saber-toothed cats, and packs of wolves roamed the Los Angeles Basin. Had we lived here then, we also would have shared territory with the short-faced bear, Arctodus simus, perhaps the largest and most powerful predator in North America at the time. When fully grown, the male of this snub-nosed, long-legged carnivore was immense, as much as 2 feet taller at the shoulder than the largest grizzly or polar bear and-- at 1,500 to 1,800 pounds-at least 500 pounds heavier than the modern species.

[gnarledmaw]

Ive read stories about the "God bears of Kamchatka" and somewhere along the line I saw a show in search of them. The "jist" of it is that some believe that a rare Arctodus simus still exists here and there generally unnoticed amongst the other brown bears of Kamchatka.

[Ursus arctos horribilis]

"At the end of the last Ice Age (just yesterday in geological time), camels, bisons, mammoths, lions, saber-toothed cats, and packs of wolves roamed the Los Angeles Basin."

They still do, plus some variants of hippos, RINO's DemoncRATs, and of course the Glutenous Michaelis Mooreass.