Allusions to the existence of the Irkuyem bear can be found in notes from the 18th century. But the question of its existence became acute at the beginning of the last century.
Irkuyem is a mysterious brown bear of unusually large size, supposedly living in remote corners of Chukotka and Kamchatka, and some researchers add Alaska and northwestern Canada to the range.
It differs from ordinary brown bears not only in size and weight (according to various descriptions, from 500 to 1500 kg), but also in physique. The irkuyem has long front and short hind legs, plus a certain "fat tail" in the back of the body, in honor of which he got his name from the Koryaks - "dragging pants".
And the fur of the Irkuyem is much lighter than that of ordinary local bears. Well, also the character. This animal is more aggressive and cocky than an ordinary bear. But he cannot leave the hunters in time due to the peculiarities of the anatomy.
In the 1920s. The Swedish zoologist Sten Bergman became seriously interested in irkuyem. Having studied the skin that came to him, the scientist announced that he had discovered a new bear - Ursus arctos piscator. The animal received the unofficial name "Bergman's bear". But after some time the discovery was questioned, and then no new convincing evidence of its existence could be found.
Later, the famous Canadian writer and Arctic expert Farley Mowat "fell ill" with irkuyem, thanks to whom the whole world learned about him.
The peak of popularity of stories about irkuyem falls on the 1960s - 1990s, when articles about the Chukotka bear appeared in the Soviet magazines Vokrug Sveta and Okhota i Okhotnaya Khozyaistvo. The writer Oleg Kuvaev even went with an expedition to the region of Lake Elgygytgyn, which is 300 km from the Chaunskaya Bay, where the animal was allegedly seen most often.
Promotional video:
Hunting experts, however, looked at the fact of its existence critically. But then an enthusiast appeared who was able to pick up the fallen banner of the search - Rodion Nikolaevich Sivolobov. He sent out his articles to local and central publications, where he talked about how strange-looking bears were hunted in Kamchatka in 1976, 1980 and 1982.
Sivolobov was in correspondence with Valery Orlov, an employee of the Vokrug Sveta magazine, so the details of the search became known thoroughly.
In short, the last fact of hunting Irkuyem refers to 1991. And then our country had no time for a new bear …
Versions
What versions do scientists put forward regarding the nature of irkuyem? The biggest enthusiasts suggest that we can talk about a small population of Arctodus simus - a giant short-faced bear that lived in North America about 10 thousand years ago.
Skeptics argue that even though Chukotka, Kamchatka and Alaska are wild places, they have been studied well enough so that one might not find a population of huge bears hiding in them for 10 thousand. years old. Moreover, on the Asian side of the Bering Strait, the remains of the seamus were never found.
Giant short-faced bear against hunters. Installation in the museum
Other cryptozoologists claim that Irkuyem is a separate subspecies of brown bears. But there is still no sufficient confirmation of this version.
Nikolay Kuzmich Vereshchagin, professor of the Zoological Institute in St. Petersburg, based on the description of Sivolobov put forward a theory of the origin of irkuyem, his article was published by the magazine "Hunting and hunting economy" in 1987 (In 1988, the studio "Kievnauchfilm" shot a film about the fauna of Kamchatka - "Where did the irkuyem go?", The plot of which was the problem of irkuyem.)
According to Vereshchagin's theory, Sivolobov met with the surviving descendants of Arctodus symus, a fossil short-faced bear. Paleontologists have found the remains of short-faced bears, and you can get acquainted with them in the natural science museums of America. But these remains were found mainly in North America, and they are unknown in Siberia.
Needless to say, how did the scientific world meet Vereshchagin's theory?
So the existence of Bergman's bear remains unproven - there are neither genuine photographs of a living animal, nor remains. There is nothing left to do but to classify "Very Big Bear" (the title of Kuvaev's article) among the cryptids, the search for which is a matter of enthusiasts.
There is an opinion that giant bears, which indeed occasionally caught the eye of people in Chukotka and Kamchatka, are nothing more than Alaskan grizzly bears (one of the subspecies of brown bear, which is distinguished by an especially large size) that entered through the Bering Strait.
It was also suggested that bears of unusual appearance could be either freaks or extremely rare cases of a cross between polar and brown bears; in both cases, they were not very viable and, probably, quickly died.