Although Baloo is described in Kipling's work as "the sleepy brown bear", Daniel Karlin, who edited the reissue of The Jungle Book in 1987, states that, with the exception of color, Kipling's descriptions of Baloo are consistent with the sloth bear, as brown bears and Asian black bears do not occur in the Seoni area where the novel takes place.

It is a common misconception that bears hibernate during the winter. While bears tend to slow down during the winter, they are not true hibernators. Black bears, Grizzly bears and Brown bears do go into a deep sleep during the winter months, known as torpor.

Over the course of six years, U.S. Geological Survey researchers used GPS collars to track 50 long-distance swims made by 20 adult female bears, some of which had cubs with them. The swims that were documented lasted from 17 hours to nearly 10 days and covered between 33 and 427 miles (54 and 687 kilometers) in the southern Beaufort Sea.

When Europeans first came to Australia, they thought that Koalas looked like bears so they were often called "Koala bears". But koalas are not bears--they are marsupials.

Sun bears take their name from the bib-shaped golden or white patch on their chest, which legend says represents the rising sun.

Polar bears give birth to one to three cubs at a time, but most often birth twins that weigh only 1.3 lbs. This evolutionary adaptation increases the likelihood that at least one cub will survive to adulthood, especially given the harsh and unforgiving conditions found in their Arctic habitat.

In August 2019, a Humboldt county sheriff's deputy was driving on State Route 96, answering a report of a drug overdose in the community of Orleans, when a bear fell or jumped onto the car, apparently from a steep embankment. After causing the vehicle to roll onto its side and burst into flames, the bear fled the scene. Fortunately, the stunned deputy wasn't injured.

A female bear is known as a sow, and the male is a boar.

The Big Dipper is one of the most easily recognizable asterisms (known pattern or group of stars) in the night sky. It is well-known in many cultures and goes by many names, among them the Plough, the Great Wagon, Saptarishi, and the Saucepan.

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 Brown Bear is also the national animal of Russia.