MacFarlane's Bear: the ancient unexpected bear of Rendezvous Lake (1864)

Fort Anderson stood on the east bank of the Anderson River, in forest far upstream of Liverpool Bay. The Hudson's Bay Company built it in spring 1861. It had one purpose. Trade with the Inuvialuit. Its manager was Roderick MacFarlane, a company officer who had named the Anderson River in 1857 after Chief Factor James Anderson. He was also a naturalist. He collected specimens for the Smithsonian in Washington.

June 24, 1864. Two Inuit hunters were out in the Barren Grounds. Their names appear in no source. They killed a bear. It was very large, and its fur was pale and yellowish. The place would later be recorded as Rendezvous Lake, northeast of Fort Anderson.

The hunters brought the skin and skull to the post. They were the only people who ever saw the animal alive. How it looked on its feet. How it moved. How it sounded. None of it survives. In the words of Futility Closet, "now their story is lost."

MacFarlane shipped the remains to Washington. In 1908, Charles Mair and MacFarlane reportedly listed the specimen in Through the Mackenzie Basin as Richardson's Barren Ground Bear, Ursus richardsoni. Then it simply waited.

1918. C. Hart Merriam, reviewing the grizzly and big brown bears of North America, found the skin and skull. The pelt was buffy whitish, brownish at the extremities, with a golden brown muzzle. The teeth were stranger. The inner cusps of the first and second upper molars were reduced or suppressed. The second lower molar lacked the notch on its outer side. Merriam judged the skull different from all other living bears. He named a new genus and species. Vetularctos inopinatus. The ancient unexpected bear. He also called it the patriarchal bear.

Not everyone agreed. E. Raymond Hall reportedly placed it within the ordinary grizzly, Ursus arctos horribilis, in 1984. Then, in 2011, the newspaper News/North asked the Smithsonian to look again. Don Wilson, chairman of vertebrate zoology at the National Museum of Natural History, examined the skin and skull. His finding was plain: "a young female grizzly bear, with no indication of polar bear characteristics." The fur was "somewhat paler than most, but in no way white or yellow." The skin, he said, "suggests nothing more than a somewhat faded, brown-looking grizzly."

By then the bear had gathered theories. Cryptozoologists suggested a grizzly and polar bear hybrid, pointing to the pale fur and the odd skull. Loren Coleman, writing on Cryptomundo in 2008, compared it to a Pleistocene survivor, the short-faced bear Arctodus simus. Sceptics answered with faded museum pelts and ordinary variation in teeth. Even the basic record is untidy. One unverified catalog summary gives a different date, 8 May 1863, and an adult male.

Guinness World Records lists MacFarlane's bear as the world's rarest bear. Coleman noted that the kill fell on St John's Day. The case resurfaced in 2011 beside a real hybrid, a bear shot near Ulukhaktok in 2010 and confirmed by DNA testing, and some retellings moved the 1864 bear there by mistake. The specimen is now catalogued as Ursus arctos. A grizzly, by the museum's reckoning. Unexpected all the same.