Mug Shot — «Berne - Brown Bear»

City: Bern Country: Switzerland Edition: 2008 Icon Edition Belongs to: 461 users (18 trading, 158 seeking)

The city of Bern or Berne is the federal city of Switzerland, and the fourth most populous city in Switzerland. The official language of Bern is German, but the main spoken language is the Alemannic dialect called Bernese German. In 1983 the historic old town in the centre of Bern became a UNESCO World Heritage Site and Bern is ranked among the world’s top ten cities for the best quality of life. The etymology of the name Bern is uncertain. According to the local legend, based on folk etymology, Berchtold V, Duke of Zähringen, the founder of the city of Bern, vowed to name the city after the first animal he met on the hunt, and this turned out to be a bear. It has long been considered likely that the city was named after the Italian city of Verona, which at the time was known as Bern in Middle High German. As a result of the find of the Bern zinc tablet in the 1980, it is now more common to assume that the city was named after a pre-existing toponym of Celtic origin, possibly *berna "cleft". The bear was the heraldic animal of the seal and coat of arms of Bern from at least the 1220s. The earliest reference to the keeping of live bears in the Bärengraben dates to the 1440s.

The brown bear is a large bear distributed across much of northern Eurasia and North America. Adult bears generally weigh between 100 and 635 kg and its largest subspecies, the Kodiak bear, rivals the polar bear as the largest member of the bear family and as the largest land-based predator. The brown bear's principal range includes parts of Russia, the United States (mostly in Alaska), Canada, the Carpathian region (especially Romania, but also Ukraine, Slovakia, Poland and so on), the Balkans, Sweden and Finland, where it is the national animal. The brown bear is the most widely distributed of all bears.

photo by lucky
edited by mobydick74

  Switzerland, Bern, MIC, MIT, MIC/MIT

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