It turns out that sugar has always appealed to bears. Long before any of us began to worry about our own diets, it was a deeply biological, survival-driven process that dates back millions of years, not in the cartoonish, honey-jar-raiding way we tend to imagine. The word “ursine,” which refers to or is associated with bears, has more significance than most people realize. It’s more than just a word from a biology textbook. It makes surprisingly timely connections between language, evolution, and diet.
The word itself, ursus, which means bear in Latin, first appeared in English usage at some point in the sixteenth century. It’s the type of word that appears more frequently in literary descriptions than in casual speech. Pat Conroy once described a character climbing stairs “with an ursine heaviness,” which perfectly captures that slow, deliberate, almost territorial weight. It was used by Carl Sagan to explain a pattern of constellations in the northern sky. When the word is used correctly, there’s a certain satisfaction in how precisely it lands. It makes a statement that “bear-like” just doesn’t.
However, the ursine meaning of food—what bears genuinely eat and why—takes things in a much more fascinating direction than etymology. The skeletal remains of a small, ancient bear known as Protarctos abstrusus were found in the 1990s by scientists working at a fossil site on Ellesmere Island in Canada’s High Arctic. It was primitive and only partially developed into what we now know as a bear; it was basal to modern bears, meaning it sat close to the base of the family tree. It wasn’t just the bones that made the discovery noteworthy. The teeth were the cause.
The presence of dental caries, or cavities, in the dentition strongly suggests that the animal was consuming a diet rich in fermentable carbohydrates. sugar. In line with what contemporary black bears do every fall—load up on high-sugar foods to build fat reserves before hibernation—the fossil site also preserved remnants of a variety of berries and boreal plant life.
It seems that this bear was doing the same thing in a High Arctic that was about 22 degrees Celsius warmer than it is now. Researchers came to the conclusion that a preference for foods high in sugar may have emerged very early in the ursine lineage, and that this tendency may have aided bears in adapting to and surviving in cold climates.
That concept has an almost disarming quality. The image of a bear surviving the winter by consuming berries is not shocking. However, the entire picture is altered when that behavior is traced back millions of years to a tiny, extinct creature in a polar forest that no longer exists. It implies that the eating habits of ursines were not unintentional adaptations. They laid the groundwork.
Interestingly, it seems that the same bear crossed the Bering land bridge to migrate from Asia, leaving no living descendants in North America. It came, consumed its berries, got its cavities, and then disappeared. From a partial skull and some fossilized plant matter, the ecological story it tells is more detailed than anyone could have imagined.
If you follow a word closely enough, it’s difficult to miss how much meaning it can convey. Ursine originated as a descriptor in Latin. It developed into an adjective for constellation patterns and football players. Beneath all of that, it alludes to a sugar-hungry bear in a prehistoric Arctic forest, eating well before the cold arrives, as bears seem to have always done.
