The species Ursus arctos, called the brown bear, is distributed throughout the Northern Hemisphere from Alaska to the northern Rocky Mountains of the United States and Canada, and from Spain to northern Japan and as far south as northern Iran and India.
North America has a variety of brown bear races and ecotypes. Although they have been labeled in a variety of different ways over the years, most experts now classify them together as the subspecies Ursus arctos horribilis. This includes the giant bears of Kodiak Island and the big brown bears or "brownies" of the Pacific mainland coast, as well as the interior brown bears of the United States and Canada, whose fur more often has the frosted, or grizzled, appearance that gave rise to the label "grizzly."
These days it is common to simply refer to all New World brown bears as grizzlies.
