Talk:Atlas Bear

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

	Mammals Portal This article is within the scope of WikiProject Mammals, a project to improve Wikipedia's articles on Mammal-related subjects. Please participate by editing the article, and help us assess and improve articles to good and 1.0 standards, or visit the wikiproject page for more details.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the quality scale.
???	This article has not yet received a rating on the importance scale.
Assessment comments This article has not been rated for quality and/or importance yet. Please rate the article and then leave comments here to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.

Is the Atlas Bear a true species? I think that it was only a North-African subspecies of Brown Bear, and its scientific name may be Ursus arctos crowtheri.--Menah the Great 00:34, 29 November 2005 (UTC)

I also heard it, and even rumours that this was not [a] valid race at all. Jurek

It was a separate breeding population, with no contact with other groups (except for human interference). There are two tendencies in biological classification: 'Lumpers', which tend to decrease the number of species and 'Splitters', which tend to increase the number of species. These trends have come and gone over the years and for much of the 19th Century the Splitters were predominate. Bears in particular suffered from this, with sometimes it seems that every new specimen was considered a new species (dinosaurs and other fossils were another group that suffered this; so did wolves). I've got one book that indicates that Modern thought is that the Atlas bear was not a separate species, but a subspecies of European Brown Bear; but species have been established with far less reasons. I do not know if there are sufficient remains left to do a DNA analysis to settle this. CFLeon 01:09, 4 August 2006 (UTC)