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A hunter who shot and killed a bear has revealed that he's been told it could be a grizzly-polar bear hybrid.

And animal experts are investigating whether it could be linked to the effects of climate change .

Didji Ishalook was out with his gun in Nunavut in Northern Canada when he targeted and brought down the large animal which he took to be a polar bear .

It was only when the 25-year-old, who lives in Arviat in Manitoba, approached his kill that he realised it was something unique.

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“They’re saying it’s a grizzly-polar bear hybrid,” he told The Star .

Andrew Derocher, a biology professor at the University of Alberta who studies the effects of climate change on polar bears, says the unusual part is how a polar bear "bumped into a grizzly bear" .

He believes it could be a sign of bear adaptation.

“Most of the mating activity of polar bears is occurring out on the sea ice, so there’s a spatial discontinuity between where a grizzly bear would be in the spring and where a polar bear would be in the spring.”

Ishalook's hybrid is not the first to be found - in fact, animal researchers already have names for the breed. They're known as grolars if the father bear is a grizzly or prizzly bears if dad's a polar.

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But it's still rare enough to be of note, with around six or so caught and killed in the last decade, the last one in 2006.

“I think it’s 99% sure that it’s going to turn out to be a hybrid,” said Ian Stirling, from at the University of Alberta.

The bear snared by Ishalook - on a hunt which obeyed laws allowing Inuit to practice subsistence hunting - has been skinned, and he's frozen the fur for a taxidermist.

ASTONISHING polar bear loves this man's workout:

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Derocher says genetic studies will help to determine more about the creature and where it came from.