YEKATERINBURG, October 9. /TASS/. Fossil bones of cave lions and brown bears have been discovered on the Gydan Peninsula in the Arctic areas of West Siberia, for the first time that far north, a Russian paleontologist said on Tuesday.
"Fossil bones of cave lions and brown bears, very rare species, have been found there. More to it, this the first such find in West Siberia," Pavel Kosintsev, a senior research fellow of the paleoecology laboratory at the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Plant and Animal Ecology, told a news conference at TASS’ Urals region center.
"We have already agreed with specialists, geneticists that they will try to find out the genealogy of these cave lions. A sample has already been sent for analysis," he said.
"Now, the habitat of these animals looks wider than it was believed before. In general, this region is interesting because it is located very close to the glacier that used to cover Scandinavia, i.e. it presented most harsh environmental conditions," Kosintsev noted, adding that the most probable reason for cave lions reaching these latitudes was their migrating after their prey animals.
According to earlier reports, a cemetery of fossil mammoth fauna, the biggest one in Russia’s Arctic, was found during an expedition to the Gydan Peninsula. Paleontologists collected more than 1,500 bones of mammoths, reindeers, horses, musk oxen, bison and other animals.
Cave lions, or Panthera leo spelaea, roamed the Eurasian continent, from Britain to the extreme east of Russia, as well as Alaska and north western Canada in the Middle and Late Pleistocene epoch (300,000-10,000 years ago). These cats received their name not because they lived in caves, but because their skeletons were found in cave bear (Ursus spelaeus) habitats. Being opportunistic predators, cave lions preyed on hibernating cave bears, along with lots of other mammals.