MacFarlane's bear
MacFarlane's bear was a grizzly bear killed in Canada's Northwest Territories in 1864. Inuit hunters shot and killed an enormous yellow-furred bear and gave the skin and skull to the Fort Anderson post manager and amateur naturalist Roderick MacFarlane (sometimes given as Robert MacFarlane) of the Hudson's Bay Company. MacFarlane shipped the skin and skull to the Smithsonian Institution where they were placed in storage and soon forgotten. Eventually, Dr. Clinton Hart Merriam uncovered the remains, which he thought had been shot very far outside the brown bear's normal range, and concluded that it was not a brown bear at all. In 1918, he described the specimen as a new species and genus, "Vetularctos inopinatus", calling it the "ancient unexpected bear."

In episode #215 of the History Channel program "Monster Quest", "Giant Bear Attack", paleontologist Dr. Blaine W. Schubert (of East Tennessee State University) was allowed to examine the skull (although the Institute did not allow the examination to be filmed). Schubert stated that he was "100% sure" that it was the skull of a young, female brown bear and "actually, not a particularly large individual."

In a 1984 publication intended to correct Merriam's 1929 taxonomy proposing 96 distinct species names for varieties of brown bear, E. Raymond Hall synonymized all 96 of Merriam's names with merely nine subspecies of "U. arctos". Hall synonymized "Vetularctos inopinatus" with "U. arctos horribilis", the normal grizzly bear.
Q171004
grizzly bear
Concept
Q16
Canada
LOC
Q2007
Northwest Territories
LOC
Q491660
Fort Anderson
LOC
None
Roderick MacFarlane
UNK
Q76039
Hudson's Bay Company
ORG
Q131626
Smithsonian Institution
LOC
Q721433
Clinton Hart Merriam
PER
Q36341
brown bear
Concept
Q34740
genus
Concept
Q2510503
Monster Quest
MEDIA
Q634669
East Tennessee State University
ORG
Q721433
Merriam
PER
Q1040689
synonym
Concept
Q171004
grizzly bear
Concept
Q1388482
MacFarlane's bear
UNK
1864-01-01T00:00:00Z^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime
1864
DATE
1918-01-01T00:00:00Z^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime
1918
DATE
1984-01-01T00:00:00Z^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime
1984
DATE
1929-01-01T00:00:00Z^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#dateTime
1929
DATE
+215^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#decimal
215
NUMBER
+100^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#decimal
100
NUMBER
+96^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#decimal
96
NUMBER
+96^^http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#decimal
96
NUMBER
located in the administrative territorial entity