These mysterious bears were once considered a legend. Until one appeared.
WHEN A GRIZZLY LOVES A POLAR
A “grolar” is the offspring of a grizzly bear and a polar bear. The “gr” comes from “grizzly,” and the “olar” from polar. (Grolars are also sometimes called “pizzly bears.”) Grolars, pizzlies, whatever you want to call them, can also be spawned by two other species of brown bears (meaning no grizzly, but a polar is still needed), although they’re rarely bred in captivity. As of 2013, only 17 are held in zoos.
Grolars typically behave more like polar bears but they possess features distinctive of both breeds. For example, their bodies tend to be smaller than those of polar bears but they usually have humped shoulders like grizzlies.
BEARLY REAL
But they’re incredibly rare in nature and, until a few years ago, wild grolars were considered a legend since no one had ever managed to track down hard evidence of their existence. You see, brown and polar bears live in ecologically diverse regions which makes the chances of them encountering one another, let alone breeding, all but impossible. (Nor do most humans who value their lives go messing around with wild bears of any kind.)
Brown bears prefer temperate forests whereas polar bears, needless to say, typically live in much chillier climates. Their “bedroom habits” are also different. While their breeding seasons overlap, brown bears prefer to mate on land; polar bears prefer ice flows.
THE GRIZZLY TRUTH
Native American legends surrounding grolars date back to at least the mid-19th century. In 1864, a group of Inuit hunters shot and killed an enormous bear in the wilds of what is now the Northwest Territories. They were mystified by its odd fur and donated the pelt and the skull to a naturalist named Robert MacFarlane. MacFarlane turned over the remains to the Smithsonian Institution. Their researchers weren’t convinced they were anything special and placed them in storage.
Sandford Fleming of Ontario invented time—he came up with the idea of Standard Time.
Years later, in 1918, a zoologist named Clinton Hart Merriam came across “MacFarlane’s Bear” in the institute’s archives and inspected the remains. He came to the conclusion that they were from a female bear unlike any other that had been identified up until that point. The teeth and skull were different than that of a grizzly and Merriam was baffled by the pelt. He decided that they belonged to a previously undiscovered species and gave MacFarlane’s Bear a new scientific title: Vetularctos inopinatus.
In the years that followed, other researchers investigated “mystery bears” like this one, but their findings were rarely taken seriously. As for MacFarlane’s Bear, some scientists theorized it was a wild “grolar”; others wrote it off as a anomaly.
A LEGEND BECOMES REALITY
Two grolar cubs were born at a zoo in Osnabrück, Germany, in 2004, but it wasn’t until two years later that one was finally discovered in the wild. An American big game hunter named Jim Martell teamed up with Roger Kuptana, an Inuit tracker, for an expedition on the NWT’s Banks Island in the spring of 2006. Martell shot and killed what he thought was a polar bear. Upon further inspection, he and Kuptana realized what they had on their hands was infinitely more rare.
DNA evidence later confirmed that their bear was, indeed, the first confirmed grolar ever discovered in the wild. Scientists in British Columbia controversially returned the bear to Martell, which he has since dubbed “Polargrizz.” As of 2007, he was keeping the stuffed grolar in his trophy room next to a Canadian wolf. It all happened again in April of 2010. A hunter named David Kuptan killed what he thought was a polar bear outside of Ulukhaktok, NWT. It turned out to be another wild grolar.
Scientists still consider the bears to be exceptionally rare in nature, but the likelihood of a population boom could increase as grizzlies are driven further north by civilization and as polar bears are driven further south by global warming.
This may come as no surprise—a Canadian invented the snowblower.