4 ms·

What evolutionary pressures would’ve caused an animal to seek a particular place to die?

• naavis 6y ago
  If the animal has a contagious disease, it makes sense to isolate itself from the others.
• distances 6y ago
  Humans, too, are affected by this at least under hypothermia. According to Wikipedia it's called "terminal burrowing", or "hide-and-die syndrome". https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypothermia
• appleflaxen 6y ago
  I don't read that in the comment. S/he is saying they were selectively preserved in the fossil record while they were there. So if they died there, we would find them, whereas megafauna in the open would be lost to decay and would not fossilize. the article does suggest they actually did live in the caves "full-time" though: In fact, most cave bear fossils have been found inside caves, and paleontologists think these bears probably lived in the caves full-time, rather than just popping in for a quick four-month nap. Across Europe and Asia, bears and people probably competed for the same real estate for around 300,000 years; it probably wasn’t much of a contest, though. These lumbering Ice Age giants stood 3.5 meters (11.5 feet) high when they reared up on their hind legs, and the largest males weighed up to 600 kilograms (1,320 pounds). That’s about the size of a large polar bear or Kodiak bear today. You wouldn’t want to meet one in a dark cave.