PG museum to play key role in grizzly research project

Not many people still call California the “Bear State,” but before the gold rush, before the state became known for technology, agriculture, and sunny beaches, before the rivers were dammed and the forests were logged, California was home to grizzly bears.

California grizzlies, a subspecies of the North American brown bear, have been extinct for nearly a hundred years  the last grizzly recorded in the state vanished in the Sierra Madre mountains in 1924, and the bulk of the population was already gone by the end of the 1800s. But a new project from the California Grizzly Research Network, a group of researchers from UC Santa Barbara and the La Brea Tar Pits/Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, seeks to trace the state’s history and biological legacy using tiny fragments of grizzly bear bone. Read more.