A 3D printed skeleton model of a rare bear predecessor is now on display at the State Museum in Bismarck. The 32-million-year-old fossil was discovered in the Little Badlands area south of Dickinson in the 1980s. With more than 80 percent of the original skeleton recovered, North Dakota Geological Survey paleontologists recently recreated this complete skeleton example using a 3D printer.
North Dakota Geological Survey Senior Paleontologist Clint Boyd says, before the original fossil was found, little was known about early bear relatives.
"So, this specimen took us from some pretty scrappy material to almost having a completely intact skeleton, to when we could look at everything about it and finally get a good understanding of the very earliest relatives of bears. What did they look like, what were they eating, how were they moving, we could fill in all those blanks."
Boyd says the early bear was about 30-inch long and could crush hard materials such as snail shells in its mouth.
"It looks a lot like a bear in the skull, a lot of the braincase and things like that, but the overall skeleton looks a lot like a raccoon or a fisher as far as how it moves and body size and things like that. It shows us that, ancestrally, these early bear relatives were a lot more like those animals, like raccoons and whatnot, in terms of, they are not running, they aren't chasing down food, they're kind of ambling along the ground, they're retreating up into trees when they have to avoid predators and things like that. So very different from what we think about modern bears."
Boyd says even though people have been collecting fossils in North Dakota for over a hundred years, they are still constantly finding new species to add to the state’s rich fossil record.