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An international team of scientists has discovered that the female ancestor of all living polar bears was a brown bear that lived in the vicinity of present-day Britain and Ireland just prior to the peak of the last ice age -- 20,000 to 50,000 years ago.
Beth Shapiro, the Shaffer Associate Professor of Biology at Penn State University and one of the team's leaders, explained that climate changes affecting the North Atlantic ice sheet probably gave rise to periodic overlaps in bear habitats. These overlaps then led to hybridization, or interbreeding -- an event that caused maternal DNA from brown bears to be introduced into polar bears.
In 2006, a hunter found, and killed, a half-polar-half-grizzly hybrid — sometimes called a pizzly bear. In 2010 a Canadian hunter found, and killed, a hybrid, and in a 2010 report, researchers said they’ve spotted seven brown bears in the polar-bear-only Wapusk National Park.