SOWEEBY — BEARS OF EASTERN ASIA 
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pelage, with a conspicuous white crescentic collar on the chest, often 
also with a white chin; long, rounded ears; longish hair; and the plantar 
and carpal pads joined together, but separate from the digital pads. 
It contains the species : Selenarctos thibetanus (Cuv.) (=U. torquatus 
Blanford), S. mupinensis Heude, S. macneilli (Lydekker), S. ussuricus 
Heude, S, japonicus (Schlegel), and S. formosanus (Swinhoe), as well 
as the black bears from Chekiang, Fukien, and Hainan Island. 
The skulls I examined belonging to this group were No. 2, the two 
skulls from Hakodate, No. 4, the Ussuri skull. No. 5, the skull labelled 
Kamschatka, No. 6, the skull bought from the Shanghai pedlar, my 
own two skulls from Manchuria, one of which, the male, I subsequently 
sent to the Smithsonian Institution, and the one given me by Captain 
Haughton from the Himalayas, altogether nine skulls from seven 
localities. Both Heude and Court ois wrongly classed the species 
leuconyx Heude, from Shensi with this genus. It rightly belongs to 
Ursus, and so the skull representing it cannot be considered here. 
In creating the genus Selenarctos Heude paid no attention to the 
South American genus Tremarctos, in which Pocock for sometime 
included the bears of the thibetanus group, after having separated them 
from Ursus on their external characters. The latter authority, how- 
ever, in his recent paper in the Annals and Magazine of Natural History, 
series 8, vol. 20, p. 129, 1917, has at last separated, under the name 
Arcticonus, the thibetanus group from Tremarctos, basing this separation 
on cranial characters — Tremarctos having a much shorter skull than 
the bears of the thibetanus group — , and remarking that there are 
probably differences in the feet and nose which will be revealed when 
fresh specimens can be examined. 
There is no doubt that Heude meant the bears of the thibetanus 
group when he created the new generic name Selenarctos, for he specifi- 
cally mentioned Cuvier ^s Ursus thibetanus, and enumerated others, 
mupinensis, ussuricus, and japonicus, as species which were commonly 
confused with it, being of a black pelage with the white crescent on the 
chest. The name Selenarctos therefore takes precedence over Arcti- 
conus, and as first reviser of the group I select Cuvier’s Ursus thibetanus 
as the type of Selenarctos, Heude having failed to choose one. 
Taking the skulls of the bears of this group that I examined, I found 
that the one bought in Shanghai (No. 6.) bore a close resemblance to 
that of the male bear from Kirin, but was narrower throughout, 
especially across the forehead; while the posterior molar in the upper 
jaw was very much smaller than that of the latter (25 mm. x 14.5 mm. 
