A hundred years after the last credible sighting of a grizzly bear in California, a new set of studies is challenging the bear’s longstanding fearsome reputation, writes Ian Rose for the Washington Post. The new research overturns longstanding conventional wisdom, even scientific consensus, about these bears’ size, diet and behavior around humans in the millennia before Europeans came and radically transformed the landscape. The new research represents a collaboration between scientists, historians and Indigenous peoples at a time when conversations about potentially reintroducing the bear to the state are gaining momentum. Photo: Gregory “Slobirdr” Smith via Wikimedia Commons
