Read the following passage. The short-faced bear was a giant North Ameri

You’ve read some theories about what the short-faced bear ate. However, each of the theories is probably wrong. Here’s why. First, the short-faced bear seems big enough to pull a giant buffalo or a mammoth down to the ground, but the skeletons of short-faced bears show that they had unusually thin bones, and thin bones meant that the short-faced bear’s front legs and paws were fairly weak in spite of their great size. Without strong bones, the short-faced bear would not have been strong enough to pull down extremely large prey like giant buffalo or mammoths.
    Second, the short-faced bear’s long legs probably made it a fast runner, but animals like deer and antelope don’t just run away in a straight line when they’re being chased. Instead, deer and antelope make sharp turns and suddenly change direction to make it hard for predators to follow them. Now, for the short-faced bear, changing directions while running at high speed would have been very difficult. The bear was simply too heavy to make a sharp turn without slowing down, so it would have been unable to catch these animals despite being a fast runner. So, it’s unlikely the short-faced bear would have fed itself by catching deer or antelope.
    Third, the short-faced bear could probably have frightened away a group of wolves or lions, but its teeth show that it was not a scavenger. You see, a scavenger eats things that other animals have already partially eaten, so an important part of a scavenger’s diet comes from chewing the bones of partially eaten animals. Since bones are hard, they leave distinct marks on the teeth of animals that chew bones, but when scientists analyzed the teeth of short-faced bears, they did not find those characteristic marks. That suggests short-faced bears were not scavengers that fed on bones.