Ursus arctos
The Cantabrian brown bear forms a part of the western type, the effective barriers of the Pleistocene ice sheets of the Alps and the Balkans having directed the spread of the brown bear respectively, north and eastwards and south and westwards. A further distinction of the two clades has been made within the western lineage following post-glacial recolonisation after the Last Glacial Maximum (LGM); one consisting of the bear populations of Southern Scandinavia, the Pyrenees and Cantabrian Mountains of Northern Spain and the other consisting of the bear populations of the Southern Alps, the Apennines, the Dinaric Alps, the Rila Mountains, the Rhodope Mountains and the Stara Planina Mountains. This leaves the remnant population of brown bears in the south of Sweden as the nearest relatives of the Cantabrian brown bear. The last indigenous, reproductive female in the Pyrenees, Canelle, was shot by a hunter in 2004. Brown bears from Slovenia are now being introduced to the Pyrenees.