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In the year 1869 A. Milne Edwards received a letter[1] from the traveller Père
A. David, dealing with several new mammals collected by him in the Eastern
Thibet, and among these was a kind of bear found in the province Moupin which
he named Ursus melanoleucus and of the exterior of which he gave a short
description. He added:
“Je n’ai point observé dans les cabinets d’Europe cette espèce qui est bien la
plus jolie du genre que je connaisse; puisse-t-elle constituer une nouveauté pour la
science!”
This wish was sufficiently fulfilled; the zoologists have played at battle-door
and shuttle-cock with the animal, from the Ursidæ to the Procyonidæ and back
again.
In March of the following year Milne Edwards shortly wrote about it[2]:
“. . . Par sa forme extérieure, il ressemble en effet beaucoup à un Ours, mais les
caractères ostéologiques et le système dentaire l’en distinguent nettement et le
rapprochont des Pandas et des Ratons. Il doit constituer un genre nouveau que j’ai
appelé Ailuropoda.”
But this name being preoccupied in another sense, P. Gervais[3] after
examining a plaster cast of its cranial cavity named it Pandarctos, considering it as an
aberrant Ursid with some Panda-like features.
At the same time A. Milne Edwards altered the name to Ailuropus which is
used by A. David in his “Rapport”[4] 1871 (15, December) where he writes: “M.
A. Milne Edwards a créé pour lui le genre Ailuropus.” He also resumes the
words of Milne Edwards about its systematic relation cited above.
The first detailed description of its exterior, its skull and its teeth was given
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