A freaky-looking severed “human hand” reportedly found at the Park County dump turned out to be a skinned bear paw — but it was an easy mistake to make.
Skinned bear paws look enough like human hands to be “creepy,” Owen Miller, a bear hunter from northeast Wyoming, told Cowboy State Daily.
“A fully-skinned bear can somewhat resemble a human, too,” he added.
Panic In Park County
The Park County Sheriff’s Office received a report at 8 a.m. Wednesday of a “body part,” possibly a human hand and/or arm, at the county dump in Cody.
“The garbage truck was emptying and it was lying on top of the pile,” sheriff’s office spokesman Monte McClain told Cowboy State Daily.
“The guy who saw it is like, ‘I dunno what it is, it looks it looks like a human hand,’” he said.
“We sent a deputy out there and the deputy immediately went, ‘That’s not a human hand, that’s a bear paw,’” McClain added.
Common Occurrence
The resemblance between skinned bear carcasses or carcass parts and human remains has at times led to panicked calls to authorities about chopped-up murder victims.
Grizzly bears remain under federal protection in Wyoming and may not be hunted here.
However, Wyoming has black bear hunting seasons every spring and fall. And bears are plentiful in northwest Wyoming.
So, the Park County dispatchers are hardly strangers to such calls about skinned black bear parts discarded by hunters, McClain said.
“Every year, or every other year, we’ll have something like this happen,” he said.
Similar Anatomy Gives Bears ‘Agility’
The musculature and skeletal structure in bear paws and human hands are similar, but not exactly the same, retired federal ecologist Chuck Neal of Cody told Cowboy State Daily.
So, he wasn’t surprised to hear that a bear paw at his local dump had prompted a call to the sheriff’s office.
“I can see how a quick, superficial glance at a bear paw” could lead somebody to think they’d found a severed hand, he said.
A skinned bear carcass, with the head removed, might freak out an untrained observer as well, he added.
“Their skinned body resembles a human body,” Neal said. "It will resemble a human cadaver. But if the observer takes a closer look, it becomes clear that it isn’t human."
Bears don’t have opposable thumbs like humans do, for one thing. So, they can’t grasp or manipulate things as well as we can, Neal said.
However, they are surprisingly “agile” with their front paws, which gives them advantages in nature, he said.
They can use them to pry at things, pull things apart, or even to swipe berries from bushes, he said.
Black bears and grizzlies both have claws, but grizzly claws are far longer.
Even so, those huge claws don’t impede grizzlies from also having great “agility” with their paws, Neal said, adding that grizzly bears are also “very adept” at fine movements with their front paws.
Mark Heinz can be reached at mark@cowboystatedaily.com.
