News Animals

Polar bears sometimes bludgeon walruses to death with stones or ice

It’s long been said that a piece of ice is the perfect murder weapon

illustration of a polar bear standing on a cliff as a rock falls toward a walrus standing on a rock below

In this illustration, which appears in an 1865 book by adventurer Charles Francis Hall, a polar bear uses a rock as a tool to kill a walrus. Some have thought that Inuit reports of this behavior were just stories, but new research suggests not.

Charles Francis Hall, Library of Congress

By Gloria Dickie

Walruses, weighing as much as 1,300 kilograms with huge tusks and nearly impenetrable skulls, are almost impossible for a hungry polar bear to kill.