Interesting Creature: The Golden Moon Bear

Oct 25, 2026 Features / Columnists, Interesting Creatures in Guyana, News

(Kaieteur News) – Only eight bear species are known to science: the American Black Bear; the European Brown Bear and Grizzly Bear which are subspecies of the same species; the Polar Bear; the South American Spectacled Bear; the Asian Sun Bear, the Asian Black Bear, and the Sloth Bear; and the Chinese Panda Bear. The moon bears’ lineage (most similar to that of the American black bear) as black-coated mountain dwellers had never been challenged; until author Sy Montgomery and her scientific colleagues turned up a new golden form.

In Montgomery’s 2002 book, Search for the Golden Moon Bear, she travels to the home of the moon bear in Southeast Asia, to track down what she hopes might be a new species of bear. What she finds is less than hopeful; bears kept in cages, often starving and neglected, their paws a culinary delicacy, their organs used for medicine. Yet Montgomery creates a hopeful narrative that weaves folklore, natural history, and scientific research into an evocative journey. Sy Montgomery is, according to Book Magazine, “A modern miracle. Bawdy, brave, inventive, prophetic, hell bent on loving this planet.”