I love learning about subspecies of bears. You'd think I would have heard of all of them by now but I still run into new ones. Quick shameless plug, but relevant - my story "The Winged Whale" in Volume 1 of The Ursus Verses is about one such subspecies, despite what the title might lead you to believe.

Pictured above, though, is a photo of an ad. I had to make it at least a little artsy to try to avoid copyright infringement and what not. I mean who takes pictures of ads right? But Canon's "Wildlife As Canon Sees It" is a legendary ad campaign that has run in every issue of National Geographic since 1982. This particular edition was in the April 1992 issue. (I'm still reading all the back issues I can, when I have time.) Back in 1992 they weren't even sure if the Gobi Bear was an actual subspecies or not. I see now on Wikipedia that it is recognized as such- Ursus arctos gobiensis.

I always find it useful to google the species Canon highlights in their ads, especially as I read back issues from a couple of decades ago. Where are they now, kind of. How many are left, to be blunt. It's not as depressing as you might guess, though it's rarely encouraging, either. So in 1992, the best estimate was about 40-60 surviving individuals. The wikipedia article cited a number of 30 from a study in 2007. And this site- which is awesome by the way, just discovered it now- guesses a population of about 40 right now. Which isn't awesome. Inbreeding alone is probably going to doom this subspecies.