Short-faced Bear

Short-faced bears were North America's largest land carnivores during the Pleistocene—standing 12 feet tall and weighing up to 2,500 pounds, they dwarfed modern grizzlies. With long legs built for speed and a more carnivorous diet than omnivorous brown bears, they represented the apex of bear predatory capability. Then they went extinct while smaller, slower, more omnivorous grizzlies survived.

The short-faced bear's extinction illustrates the danger of pure specialization in keystone roles. Their carnivorous diet required abundant large prey; when megafauna disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene, short-faced bears couldn't pivot to salmon, berries, and roots like grizzlies could. They were optimized for a world of giant sloths and camels, not the deer and elk that remained.

The business parallel is dominant specialists destroyed by shifts in their target market. Short-faced bears are like investment banks or consulting firms that dominated lucrative mega-deal markets but couldn't adapt when those deals disappeared. Grizzlies are like diversified firms that accepted lower peak returns in exchange for flexibility to serve whatever clients remained. The short-faced bear's 2,500-pound advantage meant nothing when there was nothing that size to hunt.