Never mind Leonardo DiCaprio: has anyone ever been 'raped' by a bear?

The internet did more than one double take yesterday when The Drudge Report, a news roundup by American political commentator Matt Drudge, claimed that four-time Oscar bridesmaid Leonardo DiCaprio was "raped" by a grizzly bear in his new film, The Revenant, in which the 41-year-old actor plays a fur trapper in the 19th century.

Early viewers of the film immediately denied the rumour and Fox has responded, discrediting it in a statement to Entertainment Weekly:

“As anyone who has seen the movie can attest,” a Fox spokesperson told the magazine, “the bear in the film is a female who attacks Hugh Glass because she feels he might be threatening her cubs... There is clearly no rape scene with a bear.”

But this didn’t stop people being fascinated by the original report. “DiCaprio raped by bear in Fox Movie,” ran Drudge’s headline, which is otherwise considered a rather conservative news aggregation site.

It went on to revel in animal wordplay: “Some in the audience escaped to the exits when the Wolf of Wall Street met the Grizzly of Yellowstone.” Then there's the following pull quote, presented entirely free of attribution: “He is raped - twice!”.

Despite being patently untrue, the story left many people asking the same question: has a bear ever "raped" a human, and is it even possible? Respected American political and cultural magazine The New Republic set out to investigate, and instead reported their findings about the internet search habits of humans:

A precedent of bear-on-human relations in Canadian literature has even been dredged up, and is doing the rounds on Twitter. Bear, the award-winning best-seller by Marian Engel was called “a startlingly alive narrative of the forbidden, the unthinkable, the hardly imaginable” by the Washington Post upon its publication in 1976.

Even the corridors of high office could bearly contain their curiosity. Jeb Bush’s campaign manager Tim Miller tweeted “Are there any recorded examples of a bear raping a human in real life?”

Now you ask Mr Miller, there have been no recorded cases of bears raping humans. But that doesn't stop them being a species of fascinating sexual habits. Telemark University in Norway published their findings in July that, due to female bears not being receptive to sexual advances while their cubs are around, male bears will often kill existing offspring in the hope of being in with a chance with the mother. However, they are also considered to be patient lovers, and will woo the female for weeks before mating.

Male bears have also been known to perform oral sex on each other, as observed with a pair of Brown Bears in captivity in Croatia last year. There have been no equivalent instances in the case of female bears, who, unlike most other mammals, don't have a clitoris. 

Whether or not any of this has helped or hindered Leonardo DiCaprio's Oscar campaign remains to be seen. In any case, The Revenant is released in the UK on January 15.