Size of the cave bear population and skeletal distribution from Urşilor Cave, Romania

Abstract

Spatial distribution analyses of fossil bones are often used in cave taphonomy for i) assessing directly the size of a given fossil population and ii) indirectly, for palaeo-environmental reconstructions. Urşilor Cave from northwestern Romania hosts one of the richest MIS 3 cave bear bone assemblages of Europe, and as the nature of the bone deposition was not settled yet, the study of the size of cave bear population and the distribution of the skeletal element was needed

Keywords

• taphonomy
• mis 3 cave bears
• spatial distribution analyses
• romanian carpathians