There are several antique reports about north african bears, for example by Herodotus, Virgil, Juvenal and Martial. They spoke about Lybian bears, but actually that is not really far away from the Altas mountains. The southern part of the mediteranean sea was once at most regions very similar to those parts still seen in southern Europe, i.e. a lot of forests and with much more moisture than today. The fauna of this regions was also very similar, even the Aurochs was once found in northern Africa.

The roman magistrate Domitius Ahenobarbus wrote in 61 BC that 100 Numidian bears were brought to Italy to be slaughtered in the arena. There are also notions of Trabus that north-african warriors wore not only the pelts of lions but also of bears.

I didn’t checked my own written texts when I wrote about the bear in the Zoo, but just from my memory, but at my original I wrote about the right place in Marseille, not the Jardin de Plantes.

Same thing with the discovery of the bones, I didn’t remember the correct date, but in my manuscripts I had the correct date. It is not really a wonder that no remains were conserved, because it was not always normal to conservate the bones and hides of animals from the zoos, especially in the cases of comparable normal animals like bears.

There were also several contemporary mentions about the atlas bear by Shaw (1800) and Crowther (1840).

I found also mentions of the atlas bear in “Extinct and vanishing mammals of the Old World” by Francis Harper, in “Extinct and Vanishing Animals” by V. Ziswiler and in “Grizmeks Tierleben Säugetiere Band 3″ by Bernhard Grizmek. With the exception of a small mention in “Extinct and vanishing mammals of the old world” that Cabrera doubted the existence of the altas bear, there was nowhere any hint that there was ever a general rejection against the very existence of the atlas bear. Like in so many other cases it seems that only a handful of individual scientists had their personal doubts, what is very common, but no general doubts like in the Case of Gesners Forest-Raven which much later turned out to be the northern bald ibis.

An additional note to the extinct lemurs of Madagascar: Even if there was no C14-testing method several decades ago, it was already very sure that those animals became extinct just a very short time ago, as many of their remains were in a subfossil and and very fresh state, and doubtless not older than several hundred of perhaps one thousand years old. Already in 1893 C. I. Forsyth Major wrote at “On Megaladapis madagascariensis, an Extinct Gigantic Lemuroid from Madagascar” that it is possible that some of the folkloristic creatures of the malagasy people has its base in Megaladapis, so this was not even a discovery by Heuvelmans.

Sadly my french is not very good, so I was hardly able to consult the data from Monsieur Raynal’s site, otherwise H had have further information.