That Was One Big-Ass Bear

“A male South American giant short-faced bear has just broken the record for world’s largest bear, according to a paper in this month’s Journal of Paleontology. Standing 11 feet tall and weighing in at about 3,500 pounds, the bear, which lived in Argentina during the Pleistocene Ice Age, would have towered over the world’s largest individual bear from an existing species. That distinction belongs to a male polar bear that weighed in at 2,200 pounds.”