Out on the prairie, a large male jaguar has brought down a fat young camel, which will satisfy his stomach for days. But here comes Nita now, all 495 kg of her, and she’s just as hungry. As she approaches the big cat, she lets out a warning huff. The jaguar responds with an angry snarl, but Nita keeps right on coming and huffs even louder. Now the jaguar steps in front of his kill, plants his feet, and roars defiantly, which tells Nita that it’s time to take things to the next level. She rears up to her full height of nearly three metres, raises her brawny arms, and emits a long, low growl. Sufficiently persuaded, the jaguar lowers his head and slinks away in defeat, while Nita settles down to enjoy her purloined lunch . . .
CollectA’s sole prehistoric mammal for 2025 is the North American short-faced bear known as Arctodus. Two species existed during the Pleistocene: A. pristinus, the lesser short-faced bear from the eastern U.S. and A. simus, the more famous giant one with a range extending across most of the U.S. and into Canada and Mexico. This toy represents the latter. A. simus is the largest known carnivore to have inhabited North America since Tyrannosaurus rex, with males or boars growing up to 950 kg/2094 lbs in weight and standing 3.4 metres/11’ tall when rearing up on their hind legs and 5’6” when on all fours. Females or sows were significantly smaller, but at up to 500 kg/1102 lbs and perhaps 3 metres/9.8’ tall when rearing up, they were still as big as modern male Kodiak bears. Seeing as how this toy has no visible genitalia (unlike most other CollectA prehistoric mammals), and seeing as how March is Women’s History Month in Australia, the U.K., and the U.S., I’ve chosen to make mine a sow by the name of Nita (pronounced ‘nit’), which is the Choctaw word for bear.
Nita is sculpted rearing up on her hind legs with her right arm raised high and bent at the elbow and her big paw pointing outward, as though she is striking at something with her big claws. Her left arm is held lower, but also with the paw facing outward. Her head is tilted up and her mouth is open. This pose is nearly identical to that of the Arctodus mount at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago; indeed, that mount was likely the inspiration for this toy. Bears do invariably look far more imposing when standing on their hind legs and Nita is no exception. She could be scaring away a smaller carnivore from its meal like in the opening vignette, or she could be facing off against another Arctodus. Prehistoric bears, like modern ones, would have regularly gotten into fights over food and territory, and in the case of sows, in defense of their cubs against hungry boars.
Nita stands (and she stands perfectly well on smooth surfaces) just a smidgen over 17 cm tall, which makes her the tallest out of all of CollectA’s Cenozoic beasts, even more so than the two Paraceratheriums. And at 280 g in weight, she is now their heaviest terrestrial carnivorous beast, toppling the 206 g Andrewsarchus.
Arctodus has long been depicted by paleoartists as having medium brown fur just like a modern grizzly bear. Nita, however, bucks that trend by having distinctly grey brown fur with minimal light brown wash and darkened patches on her waist and back. Her claws and the padding on her paws are dark grey. A large cream-coloured patch covers her chest, throat, and muzzle and there is a light brown, fork-shaped marking on her forehead similar to the ones found on modern spectacled bears. Her eyes are medium brown, her nose is dark grey, her mouth is dark pink, and her teeth are cream. It is quite a welcome change from the usual brown shades we see on so many prehistoric mammal toys, and it is certainly a plausible colour scheme.
Nita’s fur is laboriously sculpted to appear thick and shaggy, just like on most modern bears. Her claws are large and curved, but also blunted at the tips. This is also just like modern bears, especially brown ones, which regularly employ their claws for tasks like climbing trees (although that’s probably not something Arctodus adults engaged in), stripping bark off trees and flipping over heavy stones to find insects, and digging up roots and rodents or creating dens. And of course, they also use their claws to help grasp struggling prey and to defend themselves.
Arctodus is famous for having proportionally longer limbs than any extant bear, and this is certainly reflected on Nita. Her species was at one time envisioned as a fast-running hypercarnivore that rapidly pursued and tackled adult horses, camels, bison, and other big herbivores, but this notion has since fallen out of favour. Instead, the long limbs may have helped provide increased motor efficiency, allowing their owner to travel farther while expending less energy. Nita’s paws are similarly slender and elongated, albeit no less intimidating thanks to those aforementioned claws. The pads covering the soles of her paws on them look thick and leathery. The ones on the front paws even feature partial false thumbs, which are something lacking in brown, black, and polar bears, but present on giant pandas and spectacled bears as well as Arctodus. These “thumbs” may have assisted their owner in grasping food.
And finally we come to Nita’s head, and what a fearsome head it is. Her mouth is wide open and her lips are curled, exposing all of her sharp front teeth and her flattened rear ones. Her nostrils are widened, her snout is furrowed, her ears are perked, and her tiny eyes seem to blaze. Again, whatever you wish to imagine she’s doing, she’s doing it with fury. And she’s no stranger to violence judging from the visible nick on her right ear. Between her visage and her size, it is not at all difficult to imagine her and other Arctodus being quite capable of making a living as scavengers and kleptoparasites. Using their long limbs to trek great distances across the Pleistocene plains, they would have sniffed out the kills of grey wolves, dire wolves, jaguars like the one in the opening vignette, and even the formidable American lion and Smilodon fatalis. They would then bully (or try to bully) those other carnivores into abandoning their hard-won meals (boars, with their greater size, probably did this more frequently than sows). They also would have hunted prey themselves when necessary, although their top speed may have been between 40 and 45 km/h, which is only slightly faster than a polar bear and slower than a grizzly (recorded at 48 km/h). And they would have consumed plant matter such as leaves, roots, grasses, nuts, and fruits, crunching them up with their strong jaws. It is also worth noting that in spite of its famous moniker, Arctodus‘ face really wasn’t particularly shorter than those of most living bears. Instead, its face was much deeper, so really, “deep-faced bear” is a more fitting description.
The Deluxe Arctodus is my favourite out of all the 2025 CollectA toys. I reckon it is about as accurate as one can ask for, it’s got a distinctive colour scheme, it’s superbly sculpted, and it’s massive and looks delightfully scary. My most sincere thank you to CollectA for the review sample. I do hope that we get more prehistoric bear toys in the future, as they’re relatively rare, and most thus far have been cave bears. Any other species would be most welcome, especially the only one that was even more massive than A. simus: Arctotherium angustidens of South America.
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