The Boone and Crockett Club has confirmed a new record grizzly bear, according to a social media post shared by the club Sunday. The giant boar was taken by a traveling hunter in Alaska in 2024, and it scored 27 9/16 inches, making it the largest hunter-killed grizzly in the B&C records book.
Brian Van Lanen, of Wisconsin, killed the record-setting griz on a guided hunt near Norton Sound, Alaska, last fall, according to B&C. Hunting with guide Lance Kronberger, Van Lanen had both a moose tag and a grizzly bear tag when they set out in September, and they were holding out for the right bull one evening when they spotted the huge grizzly in an alder patch near a river. They came back the next morning to find the bear fighting a similar sized but younger boar over a fishing hole.
The younger boar was about to chase their target bear away when Van Lanen fired his .338 Lapua, rolling the bear. After Van Lanen sealed the deal with a few follow-up shots, Kronberger rushed down to recover the bear. Minutes later, when Van Lanen got there, Kronberger told him something that Van Lanen said he will never forget: “You have no idea what you’ve just killed.”
Although the two had been hunting together for years, this animal was different. Lifting its massive head out of the river, Van Lanen and Kronberger knew they’d taken one of the biggest and oldest grizzlies ever harvested in North America.
“The gigantic boar was covered in scar tissue,” B&C said in a news release announcing the new grizzly record. “The old boar’s bottom lip was split entirely in half, and its teeth were worn to nubs. [The guide] estimated the bear to be 20-25 years old.”
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After skinning out the grizzly, the two green-scored the skull at more than 27 inches. A B&C scorer taped the skull months later, after the mandatory 60-day drying period, and measured an official score of 27 9/16 — a measurement that was recently confirmed by a special judge’s panel.
With that official score, Van Lanen’s record-book bear was also just a fraction of an inch shy of the B&C world-record grizzly bear skull, which was picked up by a hunter in Alaska in 1976 and measured 27 13/16 inches.
“As for that moose tag,” B&C says, “Brian connected with a great bull just a couple of days later. A 73-inch wide beast that also made the Boone and Crockett record books.”
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