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For hundreds of thousands of years, relatives of common European brown bears roamed from Northern Spain in the west to Russia’s Ural mountains in the east. The beasts were huge — 1.7 metres tall at the shoulder, and 3.7 metres long — but unlike today’s bears, the Ursus spelaeus, more commonly known as a cave bear, was vegan, and that may be why, 25,000 years ago, it went extinct.

A recent study published in the Journal of Quaternary Science, and worked on by scientists from Japan, Germany, Belgium and Canada, determined what cave bears ate by examining the amino acids in the collagen of bones found near Goyet, Belgium. Previous efforts simply measured the amount of nitrogen and carbon in collagen, and couldn’t control for environmental factors and other variables.

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Dr. Keith Hobson, a professor at the University of Western Ontario and co-author of the study, called the method a “breakthrough,” since it provided, for the first time, a distortion-free picture of a prehistoric diet. He was also surprised by the result.