A 34-year-old grizzly bear captured last summer in southwestern Wyoming has been confirmed as the oldest on record in the Yellowstone region, Wyoming wildlife officials said.
When captured, Grizzly Bear 168 had just a few teeth left and weighed 170 pounds, a fraction of the 450 pounds the bear weighed as a 5-year-old when he was captured in the Shoshone National Forest in August 1991.
The decision to euthanize the bear came after U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service discovered the bear had three nubs for canine teeth and was most likely preying on calves after examining them in the region.
“You’ll skin them and there’s like terrible bruising, but there’s no real punctures,” Dan Thompson, a biologist with Wyoming Game and Fish, told the Jackson Hole News & Guide. “They have so much strength in their jaws they can kill an animal by basically gumming it.”
