Beth Shapiro
👤 PersonAppearances Over Time
Podcast Appearances
And brown bear boys would move onto the islands as the habitat got better, where they encountered these populations of polar bears that had been stranded there as the ice receded, pretty much.
And so they hybridized there.
And all brown bears in North America today...
have ancestry from that admixture with polar bears geez wow that's so fascinating yeah it's just like how we all have ancestry from mixing with neanderthals and is that from the german zoo because there's a couple of bears at it but that really looks like a hybrid doesn't it yeah it looks like there's a lot of traits of both of them yeah it's impressive
It's kind of that, but it's also that we haven't agreed, right?
So there's this group of academic scientists who are trying to say, trying to grasp so tightly to this very precise definition of a species as having to do with DNA, how much DNA matches something else.
But that is... And it's interesting.
I think the reason that we keep having this conversation is because it's genuinely interesting to talk about species concepts.
We have come up with, you know, dozens of different species concepts, and they're all for a particular purpose.
wanting to have a conversation about dinosaur fossils or anything that's a fossil, I'm going to use the morphological species concept because that's all I've got.
I'm going to compare the shape of this bone with the shape of this bone, and if they're similar enough to my trained eye, I'm going to call that a species.
I saw you had a bison priscus, I'm going to say, skull out there.
Yeah, step bison, bison priscus.
Bison crassicornis, bison occidentalis, bison alaskensis, bison, I could go on forever I, you know, this is, the naming of bison was like sport in the 18th, 19th centuries, mostly 19th century.
I don't think I've been to his.
I didn't go with Ben, but I've been working up in that part of the world for 30 years.
We spend a lot of time working at gold mines outside of Dawson City.