May 19, 2000
Brown Bear Skeleton on Display at Egan Library

What may be one of the few brown bear skeletons anywhere is now on permanent public display at the University of Alaska Southeast's Egan Library.

One year ago this month, University of Alaska Southeast junior Tony Nizich shot a large brown bear in the northern Lynn Canal area. He spent nearly a year
cleaning each bone and then rejoining them for display.

"As far as I know it would be unusual to come across another brown bear skeleton," Nizich said. "In at least eight months of research I wasn't able to find one."

The very large brown bear measured nine feet from nose to tail and weighed 1,070 pounds. Nizich cleaned the bones from September until Christmas. He
worked 8 hours a day throughout the holiday break joining each bone back into a skeleton. He finally completed the assembly at the end of February. "It was
really fun," Nizich says, "It was also a lot of work."

To help reassemble the bones, Nizich looked for pictures of brown bear skeletons and could find only three. One was a panda skeleton, one was in a children's
book, and one was an old cave bear skeleton he found on the Internet. "Those were the only photos I was able to go by," he said. "Everything else I referred to
was cat and dog skeletons." Nizich received eight university credits for his two-semester independent study project with Dr. Brendan Kelly.

Nizich, a biology major, says viewers might be most surprised by the difference in size of the life-size mount of the bear and the skeleton. "The skeleton is so
small and fragile looking compared to the mass and size of the animal that it supports," according to Nizich. The life-size mount of the bear is in the Juneau
Douglas High School commons.

Nizich plans on entering dental school after graduating from UAS. "I hope this will help me with some of the anatomy classes that I might take," he said.