Cave Bear

The Cave Bear is a species of bear that lived in Europe and Asia during the Pleistocene and became extinct about 24,000 years ago during the Last Glacial Maximum.

Appearance
One of the most famous of all prehistoric mammals--on a par with the Woolly Mammoth and the Saber-Toothed Tiger--the Cave Bear (technically known as Ursus spelaeus) was one of the most common animals of Pleistocene Europe. There are an astonishing number of Cave Bear fossils; some caves in Europe have yielded literally thousands of bones, to the extent that Ursus spelaeus skeletons were processed in bulk for their valuable phosphates during World War I. This doesn't mean, however, that Cave Bears died en masse like herd animals from disease or flash floods; you have to realize that the same caves could be occupied by these beasts for hundreds of thousands of years, so one or two deaths a year added up to a lot of bones!

Behaviour
There are three popular misconceptions about the Cave Bear. First, Ursus spelaeus wasn't any bigger than modern Brown Bears or Polar Bears; males attained maximum weights of about half a ton, while the much smaller females only tipped the scales at 500 pounds or so. Second, the bulk of the evidence points to Cave Bears being confirmed vegetarians, though they may have supplemented their diets with occasional servings of meat. And third, Cave Bears and early humans didn't overlap in any significant way, though there are some hints that small populations of Neanderthals may have worshiped this intimidating beast; whatever the case, humans certainly didn't hunt the Cave Bear to extinction, as they did so many other megafauna mammals of the last ice age. (However, a new study concludes that early humans may have helped doom Cave Bears by competing with these beasts for warm, dry caves.)

In Prehistoric Park
Nigel disturbs a Cave Bear during his first trip to The Ice Age, and it chases him and the cameraman, who drops the camera. It is later shown that they had both climbed up a tree. They then observe the Bear foraging.