Mexican grizzly bear
| Mexican grizzly bear | ||||||||||||
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Mexican grizzly bear ( Ursus arctos nelsoni ) |
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| Ursus arctos nelsoni | ||||||||||||
| Merriam , 1914 |
The Mexican grizzly bear ( Ursus arctos nelsoni ), also known as the Mexican silver grizzly , is a taxonomically controversial, extinct subspecies of the brown bear . It was named after the American naturalist Edward William Nelson , who supported several expeditions of the US Biological Survey.
description
When the white settlers arrived, the Mexican grizzly bear was the second largest mammal in Mexico after the bison. He reached a length of 183 centimeters and an average weight of 318 kilograms. Because of his silvery fur color he was often called "el oso plateado" "the silver bear". Otherwise he resembled the black bear rather than the brown bear in stature.
Occurrence and habitat
The Mexican grizzly bear inhabited the northern territories of Mexico, particularly the temperate grasslands and pine forests of the mountains. Its original range reached from Arizona via New Mexico to Mexico.
Food and way of life
Its diet consisted mainly of plants, fruits and insects. Occasionally it also ate carrion and small mammals. One to three boys were born every three years.
die out
The Conquistadors came into contact with him as early as the 16th century when Francisco Vásquez de Coronado marched from Mexico City in 1540 on his search for the seven golden cities of Cibola to New Mexico and the Buffalo Plains in Texas and Kansas . By the 1930s it was so severely shot, trapped and poisoned that it was only found in the state of Chihuahua in the isolated mountain islands of Cerro Campana, Santa Clara and Sierra del Nido 80 kilometers north of Chihuahua. Around 1960 there were only 30 copies left. While the Mexican government was proclaiming legal protection for these bears, the farmers continued to kill them. Around 1964, the Mexican grizzly bear was considered extinct. After allegedly spotting a few specimens on a ranch on the upper reaches of the Río Yaqui in the province of Sonora in 1968 , the American zoologist Dr. Carl B. Koford carried out a three-month search, which did not bring any evidence of the continued existence of this bear subspecies.
literature
- Walton Beacham: World Wildlife Fund Guide to Extinct Species of Modern Times , 1997, ISBN 0-933833-40-7
- Julian Huxley, Martyn Bramwell et al .: Large Atlas of Animal Life , Corvus Verlag, 1974
- David Day: The Doomsday Book of Animals. A Natural History of Vanished Species . Viking Press, New York NY 1981, ISBN 0-670-27987-0 .
- Edwin Antonius: Lexicon of extinct birds and mammals . Natur und Tier Verlag, Münster 2003, ISBN 3-931587-76-2 .