Just days ago, I wrote an article about how the world’s oldest DNA was recovered from mammoths that lived more than a million years ago. The DNA was collected from three ancient mammoths that were preserved in the Siberian permafrost. And now, new research has revealed that the oldest DNA from an animal not preserved in permafrost has been extracted from an ancient cave bear. The DNA was extracted from a large and vegetarian 360,000-year-old cave bear that lived in what is now Georgia during the Middle Pleistocene Period. The cave bears’ scientific name is Ursus kudarensis praekudarensis and they were known to hibernate in caves during the winter months. They weighed as much as a tonne (over double the size of a male polar bear) despite only eating plants and since they had a hard time storing fat away for their hibernation periods, they occasionally died during the winter months.