Gran Dolina bear

The Gran Dolina bear, Ursus dolinensis, is an extinct bear named after the Gran Dolina site, part of the Atapuerca Mountains complex in the Burgos province of northern Spain, where its fossils were found in the lowest layers of the sequence. Nuria García and Juan Luis Arsuaga described the species in 2001 from cranial fragments recovered from units TD 3 and especially TD 4, which date it to between 900,000 and 780,000 years ago in the Early Pleistocene. It is described as the most primitive of all cave bears and smaller than a black bear, with a slender, brown-bear-like body and gracile skull and jaw bones. The type specimen is a 255 millimetre left mandible fragment, and a complete skull found in the 2012 excavation helped fix its place in the family tree as the probable ancestor of Ursus savini.