Beth Shapiro

I have a 75-pound Labrador retriever.

Oh, friend, can we play?

yikes yeah i don't know they're spooky they're cool but they're spooky you know i don't know how many you want around and there are a lot of cats maybe it's because we don't have any of the other predators that used to be there i mean the california golden bear there's another one that hearst i think hearst collected one of the last ones of the california golden bear in southern california had him shipped up to san francisco and he became the bear that's the inspiration for the flag oh really his name is monarch we actually sequenced his genome too it's

It's named after the guy.

I wonder if it's worth it to him.

Yeah.

Well, by the time I think it was on the flag, it was already on their way out.

You know, we showed recently using DNA that they're really closely related to the bears that are in Yellowstone right now.

So if we really want bears in California, you can just bring those guys over.

Monarch had a miserable life, though.

He was mostly in a cage.

He was being fed the wrong diet for a brown bear, just mostly meat.

So right now he's on display.

He's not on display, actually.

He is in the basement in a fridge at the Cal Academy of Sciences in San Francisco.

But his post-cranial skeleton, everything except his head, is at Berkeley in the museum.

We've sampled it for DNA.

But they were just giving him meat.

I imagine he was just really uncomfortable all the time.

Can you imagine if you just ate only meat?