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JOURNAL OF MAMMALOGY 
was no means of ascertaining whether it represented U. beringianus or 
not. Both Heude and Courtois seem to have considered it to belong 
to Middendorff’s species. Its label marked ‘^District de Behring’’ 
suggests that it came from very much further north than Great Shantar 
Island, which is near the mouth of the Amur, in the South Okhotsk 
Sea, and is the type locality of beringianus. In this case the skull 
probably belongs to some other form. 
U. beringianus is a large, dark brown species, to judge from speci- 
mens in the Tring Museum. But at best it can only be considered an 
island form of the mainland U. mandchuricus. 
Habitat: — Great Shantar Island. 
III. Spelasus Brookes, 1828^ 
Cat. Anal. & Zool. Museum of Josh. Brookes, London, 1828. 
Type: — Ursus spelceus Rosenmuller, (= Speloeus antiquorum used by Brookes). 
Belonging to this group of bears, to which Heude gave the generic 
name Melanarctos, and which contains the prehistoric cave-bears as 
well as the recent cave-bears or grizzlies, there are some three species 
known to occur in eastern Asia, and apparently a fourth in central 
Asia. These are: (1) Spelceus melanarctos (Heude) from Yezo, (2) 
S. cavifrons (Heude) from Manchuria, (3) S. piscator (Pucheran) from 
Kamschatka, and (4) S. leuconyx (Severtzow) from the Altai region. 
These may be considered the Asiatic representatives of the American 
grizzlies on the one hand and the extinct European cave-bears on the 
other. 
They are large species, in which the skull is very long and narrow, 
relatively more so than in Ursus, with very high foreheads so that the 
cranial outline at this point is strongly concave. The cranium itself 
is very narrow, the muzzle and jaws narrow and deep. The soles of 
the feet agree very much with those of Ursus. 
From the general appearance of the skulls of Heude’s two species, 
S. melanarctos, and S. cavifrons, it is evident that this authority was 
right in separating these bears from the Ursus group. In this con- 
nection Mr. Gerrit S. Miller, Jr., referring to a specimen of cavifrons 
secured by me in the Manchurian forests, has written me under date of 
January 17, 1917, as follows: — 
^ This name precedes E. Geoffrey’s Spelcearctos, Rev. Encyclopedique, 59, 
p. 81, 1833. 
