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How Irish are Arctic Polar Bears ?
last update: Jul 12, 2011 08:22 PM
From various articles: They might look pure white, but the polar bears inhabiting Canada's Arctic apparently have faint traces of brown, and a dash of shamrock green, in their DNA.
According to an international team of researchers, the ancestry of every polar bear in the world, including Canada's population of about 15,000, are linked to the skeletal remains of an extinct species of brown bear from Ireland.
They found that the genetic material in every living polar bear contains a telltale marker indicating they all descended from a single mating about 50,000 years ago between a prehistoric male member of the species and a female Eurasian brown bear on the Emerald Isle.
The finding sheds important new light on the way bears adapted to habitat upheaval during the Ice Age and on how present-day climate change could also lead to more inter-species breeding.
Team leader Beth Shapiro, a Penn State University biologist said "Despite these differences, we know that the two species have interbred opportunistically and probably on many occasions during the last 100,000 years. Most importantly, previous research has indicated that the brown bear contributed genetic material to the polar bear's mitochondrial lineage — the maternal part of the genome, or the DNA that is passed exclusively from mothers to offspring."
But until now, Shapiro added, "it was unclear just when modern polar bears acquired their mitochondrial genome in its present form."
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