ANT-EATING BEAR

naturalia
‘Oso hormiguero’, from Trujillo del Perú, vol. 6, plate 39 (courtesy of Patrimonio Nacional).
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Helen Cowie

Two fossil skeletons and a ‘recently born’ Ant-eating Bear or Oso Hormiguero were submitted to the Royal Cabinet of Natural History in Madrid by the Bishop of Trujillo, Baltasar Jaime Martínez Compañón. Martínez Compañón also sent a watercolour of a living anteater, busily foraging for insects, and the stuffed cadaver of an adult anteater, its tongue packaged separately and ‘wrapped in paper’ to avoid damage during transit.

Further reading
  • Bleichmar, D. (2017) Visual Voyages: Images of Latin American Nature from Columbus to Darwin (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press/Huntington Library).
  • Cowie, H. (2011) Conquering Nature in Spain and its Empire, 1750–1850 (Manchester: Manchester University Press).
  • De Vos, P. (2009) ‘The rare, the singular and the extraordinary: natural history and the collection of curiosities in the Spanish Empire’, in Science in the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, edited by D. Bleichmar, P. De Vos, K. Huffine, and Sheehan, 271–89 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press).
  • Dillon, J.T. (1780) Travels through Spain, with a View to Illustrate the Natural History and Physical Geography of that Kingdom (London:Robinson).
  • Gerbi, A. (1973) The Dispute of the New World (Pittsburgh, PA/London: University of Pittsburgh Press).
  • Gómez-Centurión Jiménez, C. (2011) Alhajas para Soberanos: los animales reales en el siglo XVIII: de las leoneras a las mascotas de cámara (Madrid: Junta de Castilla y León).
  • Urríes y de la Colina, J.J. (2011) ‘Un Goya exótico, “La osa hormiguera de Su Majestad”’, Goya: Revista de arte, vol. 336, 242–53.
  • Outram, D. (1995) ‘New spaces in natural history’, in Cultures of Natural History, edited by N. Jardine, J. Secord, and E. Spary, 249–65 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
  • Mazo Pérez, A.V. (2006) ‘El oso hormiguero de Su Majestad’, Asclepio, 58 (1): 281–94.
  • Pimentel, J. (2017) The Rhinoceros and the Megatherium: An Essay in Natural History (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press).