The Malay words for Sun Bear are “he who likes to sit high”. The Sun bear is the smallest member (27 to 65 kg)  of the bear family and also the least studied.

The Malayan sun bear has a mustard-colored crescent on its chest and close-cropped brown or black fur.

They have a very long tongue which is probably an adaptation for extracting honey and insect from deep crevices in trees.

Because they are so rare, very little research has been done on sun bears. Unusual is that in the sun bear family, the father actually remains as part of the family group

Sun Bear Brain Size relative to other other Carnivores:

Looking at tables by Roehrs, Kamiya, Pirlot and Gittleman you can see that the Sun Bear’s brain is over 2.6 times that of the gray wolf (canis lupus, 30 to 40 kg) and 50% larger then that of the lion. Only the 298 kg brown bear and the 342.5 kg polar bear had a brain size greater then the sun bear; the tiger (159.2 kg), lion (176 kg), and American lion (382 kg), for example, all had smaller values.

The sun bear had a brain volume of 345 ccs; to compare it to some primates:

Encephalization quotients:

(EQ) = actual brain mass  ÷ predicted brain mass for body size. It is a useful measure because it tells us how much bigger or smaller an animal’s brain is after it is corrected for body size. (A quotient less than 1 indicates brain mass is less than the predicted value.) There are a number of examples of animals that have very much higher values for EQ than the rest of their order. Humans, of course, and capuchin monkeys have very high values for primates. The high value for carnivores is the Malayan sun bear (Ursus malayanus).