In the 19th century, the grizzly was classified as 86 distinct species. However, by 1928 only seven grizzly species remained, and by 1963 scientific testing had revealed that all grizzlies are the same species.

Ginger, a resident of the Columbus Zoo, was euthanized in 2015 at the age of 40, but most grizzlies die in their first few years of life from predation or hunting.

Bears have an extraordinarily highly-evolved sense of smell. Their world is dominated by odor. In fact, according to the number of scent receptors, the bear has the best sense of smell of all terrestrial mammals--7 times better than a blood hound's or 2,100 times better than a human.

Although the grizzly bear appears prominently on the state flag of California and was the symbol of the Bear Flag Republic before California's admission to the Union, the last California grizzly was killed in the Sierra foothills east of Fresno in August 1922.

In an October 1807 letter to President Thomas Jefferson that accompanied a gift of two grizzly bear cubs, Capt. Zebulon Pike wrote that the bears were of "a different species of bear from that found in the East" and that they were considered to be the "most ferocious animals of the continent." Jefferson reluctantly accepted the cubs and kept them in a cage near the north entrance of the White House before re-gifting them to museum operator Charles Willson Peale.

Populations in Alaska are densest along the coast, where food supplies such as salmon are more abundant. The Admiralty Island National Monument protects the densest population: 1,600 bears on a 1,600 square-mile island.

Yogi is most definitely a grizzly bear, though not a particularly large one. And his sidekick Boo Boo is a grizzly cub of some undetermined age, but obviously old enough to talk.

Bears feature prominently in Finnish mythology as ancient Finno-Ugric peoples held bears as feared and honoured totemic animals. Finns still consider the bear "King of the Forest."

The Kodiak bear, which inhabits the islands of the Kodiak Archipelago in southwest Alaska, has been known to exceed weights of 1,500 lbs (680 kg). Despite this large variation in size, the diet and lifestyle of the Kodiak bear does not differ greatly from that of other brown bears.

The show portrayed the fictional Grizzly Adams as a frontier woodsman who fled into the mountains after he was wrongly accused of murder. While struggling to survive, Adams saves an orphaned grizzly bear cub he adopts and names Ben. The bear, while growing to its huge adult size, becomes Adams' closest companion.