Bear Skin and Bear Coat

Bear Skin is the Drupal starter theme included with the Bear install profile. Bear Skin comes with a sub-theme, Bear Coat, which contains some basic styling. Bear and Bear Skin can function independently. The Bear Skin theme, like the Bear install profile, is intended as a starter kit that you can customize as needed.

Which One Should I Use?

Bear Skin is a base theme that provides minimal design and functionality. Use Bear Skin if you intend to start from scratch and impose your own custom layout, theming and functionality to your Bear site. For multisite instances, you will want to create your own sub-themes of Bear Skin so they all inherit the same code. Modifications to the Bear Skin base theme will be applied to all sub-themes unless they are overwritten.

Bear Coat is a sub-theme of Bear Skin that provides additional theming out of the box. Use Bear Coat if you do not intend on changing the general layout but would like to update the styling.