Polar bear the polar bear in advertising, while Fox's Glacier Mints have featured a polar bear named Peppy as the brand mascot since 1922. Polar bears are popular in fiction, particularly in books for children or teenagers. For example, "The Polar Bear Son" is adapted from a traditional Inuit tale. The animated television series "Noah's Island" features a polar bear named Noah as the protagonist. Polar bears feature prominently in "East" (also released as "North Child") by Edith Pattou, "The Bear" by Raymond Briggs (adapted into an animated short in 1998), and Chris d'Lacey's "The Fire Within" series. The "panserbjørne" of Philip
Brown bear remains in debate. The polar bear is a recent offshoot of the brown bear. The point at which the polar bear diverged from the brown bear is unclear with estimations based on genetics and fossils ranging from 400,000 to 70,000 years ago, but most recent analysis has indicated that the polar split somewhere between 250,000 and 130,000 years ago. Under some definitions, the brown bear can be construed as the paraspecies for the polar bear. DNA analysis recently revealed that the brown bears in North America are genetically quite homogeneous except for the one subspecies the Kodiak bear and the