yes! pandas are definitely on the more extreme end of this, but bears in general do a weird almost-marsupial thing where the babies come out RIDICULOUSLY undercooked, and have to spend one to three solid months in the den with mom before they’re baked through enough to toddle outside!
but they’re perfectly photogenic by that point, of course. so who cares.
in other words: BEAR LARVA.
This is likely why Pliny and Aelian described bear cubs being born as shapeless lumps, which the parent then licks into shape.
Medieval accounts turned it into a moral lesson – we have to be metaphorically licked into shape by our parents to become upstanding adults.
May I offer you regular moon bears & one golden moon bear though?
hm. I’ll allow it.
So happy to see a clear pic of a golden moon bear. They used to just be a rumor.
He’s just a regular mom bear with a negative color filter.
I know you’re being silly, but let me be serious for a moment.
So, a lot of the species in certain parts of Asia aren’t particularly well-documented in the ways we’re accustomed to in the “Western world”. Which gets into a lot of ambiguity. There had been rumors of “golden bears” for a long time.
And to those who know about bears, this is incredibly exciting! The problem is, the people who would mention “golden bears” didn’t distinguish them clearly.
Understand, there’s sorta three tiers:
Species – distinct, separate species. This used to be treated as meaning “cannot interbreed and produce fertile offspring” but that has proven a little fuzzier than we used to think.
Subspecies – can interbreed, but generally doesn’t.
Morph – distinct set of features which show up within a population but do not constitute a separate population.
(If you’re the nitpicky kind of person, you will please note how i said “sorta” before you do your “Well actually” bullshit. The last couple of decades have wrecked our approach to taxonomy.)
Anyway, so there had been rumors of golden moon bears, but no proof. The most optimistic but least likely option was that these would prove to be an entire new species of bear. Which is, remarkably, plausible for the regions in question where our knowledge of species populations is vague enough that there could be a whole other large carnivore out there. And finding a ninth species of bear would be a hell of a thing. But that’s not likely.
Finding a subspecies would be pretty damned cool, and explain why they’re only rumor most of the time.
But the most likely option was color morph. Just like some people are blondes or readheads, sometimes moon bears are golden.
It wasn’t until the 90s that someone actually mounted a trip to various parts of Asia, following rumors of golden moon bears – which was challenging as these rumors often originated with illegal hunting – until they managed to find a number of actual golden moon bears, and gather enough DNA samples to determine where they fit taxonomically. Disappointingly, it turns out they’re just a color morph – but now we know.
