Atlas bear
| Atlas bear | ||||||||||||
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Roman mosaic of an atlas bear |
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| Ursus arctos crowtheri | ||||||||||||
| Schinz , 1844 |
The atlas bear ( Ursus arctos crowtheri ), also known as the Berber bear , is an extinct subspecies of the brown bear , which is sometimes viewed as a separate species ( Ursus crowtheri ). The first scientific description comes from the Swiss zoologist Heinrich Rudolf Schinz from 1844.
Appearance
According to Schinz's description, the atlas bear had a brownish-black coat color and a black snout. Accordingly, he did not look like the strikingly brightly colored Syrian brown bear . Its snout and claws were smaller than those of the American black bear , but its physique was stronger and thicker than this one.
From skeleton finds one could see that atlas bears were roughly the size of European brown bears and could weigh around 200 to 350 kg. They fed on smaller mammals and apparently on roots, nuts and other fruits. The atlas bear is said to be extremely aggressive.
Distribution area
The atlas bear was the only indigenous bear in Africa that was reliably attested in historical times . He lived in the North African Atlas Mountains and the surrounding areas from Morocco to Algeria to Libya and is best known for bone finds from caves. Today it is believed to have been extinct since the 19th century.
Other than reports from Roman times, there are few sources mentioning bears from western North Africa. It was not until the end of the 19th century that fossil and subfossil remains were found that prove that a species of bear lived there. Based on the bone material, it is classified as a subspecies, less often as a separate species.
There are Pleistocene finds as well as ancient pictures of brown bears from Egypt, which probably immigrated there from the northeast via the Sinai. Details of the relationship to the brown bears of the Atlas are not known.
die out
Thousands of these bears were trapped in ancient animal scavengers and sold to the Romans, the animals in animal hunts in the Circus Maximus , the Colosseum , other amphitheatres of and small arenas in Roman military camps to the amusement of the audience Venators put to death or other animals. Atlas bears were also used in Damnatio ad bestias (Latin for "condemnation to the beasts") to kill condemned people, or simply hunted as a sport.
The last certain evidence is a female who was shot in 1840 at the foothills of the Tetuan Mountains in Morocco (see below). According to unconfirmed reports by the French naturalist Jules René Bourguignat (1829-1892), however, there were still bears in the Edough massif in eastern Algeria in 1867. It is believed that the atlas bear was exterminated around 1869, when the last known specimen was killed by hunters in northern Morocco. The exact time of its extinction is unknown.
Taxonomy and genetics
The first scientific description of the species by Heinrich Rudolf Schinz in his work Systematic Directory of all mammals known to date or Synopsis Mammalium according to the Cuvier system , Volume 1, published in Solothurn in 1844, as " Ursus Crowtheri , the bear from the Atlas" is very short . For distribution he writes Habitat in montibus circa Tetuan (inhabits the mountains around Tetuan) , i.e. today's Tétouan in Morocco. The description refers to an old female who was shot " at the foot of the Tetuan Mountains, about 25 miles from the Atlas ".
According to Yadav (2004), one specimen is said to have reached the Marseille zoo around 1830, but was not preserved after his death. However, the Marseille Zoo was not established until 1854.
There are no photographs, no scientific images, museum specimens or complete skeletons of the subspecies. In addition to the old travelogues and the ancient sources, there is only subfossil bone material, usually from caves.
After analysis of genetic material ( aDNA ) from subfossil bone material from seven individuals, it was found to be genetically heterogeneous. In some cases, the individuals were genetically almost identical to bears from the Cantabrian Mountains (northern Spain), which are assigned to a lineage of brown bears, clade V, which is widespread in southern Europe . Some other individuals were genetically clearly distinguishable from this and formed their own line, which was not proven anywhere else (clade VI). The close relationship of the bears north and south of the Strait of Gibraltar is unusual for a land-living mammal; it is interpreted as a comparatively recent immigration from the north, either natural or mediated by humans. It would be conceivable, for example, that bears caught and kept in Roman arenas escaped into the wild to hunt animals.
literature
- David Day : The Doomsday Book of Animals: A Natural History of Vanished Species . Viking Press, 1981, pp. 168-170 (including illustration) ISBN 0-670-27987-0
- Watik Hamdinea , Thévenotb, Michel; Michaux, Jacques (1998). "Histoire récente de l'ours brun au Maghreb". Comptes Rendus de l'Académie des Sciences 321 (7): 565-570. doi : 10.1016 / S0764-4469 (98) 80458-7
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Nicolas Manlius (1998): L'ours brun en Égypte. Ecology 29 (4): 565-581.
- ^ PR Yadav (2004): Vanishing and Endangered Species
- ^ Adrian Burton (2014): Where you wouldn't believe. Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 12 (9): 536. doi: 10.1890 / 1540-9295-12.9.536
- ↑ S.Calvignac, S. Hughes, C. Tougard, J. Michaux, M. Thevenot, M. Philippe, W. Hamdine, C. Hänni (2008): Ancient DNA evidence for the loss of a highly divergent brown bear during clade historical times. Molecular Ecology 17: 1962-1970. doi: 10.1111 / j.1365-294X.2008.03631.x