SCIENTISTS have been stunned by the discovery of a shark that had eaten a polar bear.
Part of the jaw of a young polar bear was found in the stomach of a Greenland shark in Svalbard, northern Norway.
Kit Kovacs, of the Norwegian Polar Institute, said: "We've never heard of this before.
"We don't know how it got there. We can't s
ay whether or not the shark took a swimming young bear or ate a carcase.
"We don't know how active these sharks are as predators."
However, shark experts think it was likely the bear was dead before the shark found it. Even a young bear would be a ferocious opponent for a Greenland shark.
"It sounds like a scavenge," said Steve Campana, the head of the Canadian shark research laboratory at the department of fisheries and oceans.
He said he had not heard of a shark eating a bear before.
Jeffrey Gallant, the co-director of a Canadian-based shark research group, said: "There's no possibility a Greenland shark could predate a live adult white bear, unless it was injured or seriously ill."
He said the Greenland shark would not be able to afford the risk of injury, or the expenditure of energy needed to kill such a large and dangerous animal.
"There is far easier prey to be found," said Mr Gallant.
He did not think attacks from sharks were a new threat to polar bears, on top of the loss of habitat caused by climate change.
The United States this year listed polar bears as threatened under its Endangered Species Act, because their sea-ice habitat is shrinking.
The full article contains 280 words and appears in The Scotsman newspaper.
