it’s not just you, sun bears just look incredibly bizarre when you stack them up against other bears!
pictured: bear
pictured: film extra from the first narnia movie in a hyperreallistic fursuit:
but as always, there are real valid reasons behind mother nature’s stupid horseshit!
the sun bear has bizarrely humanlike limbs because, living in a hot tropical environment, they have no need for the enormous fat reserves of the temperate bears! this makes their bodies a LOT thinner and really screws up their proportions.
like really, REALLY screws up.
but sun bears do actually have longer front legs than other bears, along with larger claws, longer tongues, and cartoonishly mobile muppet faces.
and for good reason: sun bears are specialized predators of social insects!
the long legs and huge claws let the sun bear rip into beehives and termite mounds alike with wild abandon, while the long tongue and agile face assist the sun bear with getting all slurpy slurpy on the innocent hive insects and their delicious larva who were just going about their normal insect day when the sun bear rolled into town.
“aaaieeee! please, not the children!”
now insects aren’t ALL a sun bear eats, by any means, but they DO form the bulk of the protein in the sun bear’s diet, so they’ve got good reasons to look the way they do!
humans just tend to find the wonky proportions pretty off-putting, and it doesn’t help that many sun bears also have light-colored eyes which humans find incredibly freaky.
NYEGH okay that is pretty awful.
anyway tldr sun bears look weird because the bear family tried to produce an anteater, and they didn’t do a half-bad job at it!
ifesbob 