Spectacled Bear

Every other member of its subfamily is extinct, including the enormous short-faced bears of the Pleistocene Americas. What remains is a modest animal with pale markings around the eyes as individual as a fingerprint, spending much of its time in trees, building feeding platforms of broken branches, and living largely on bromeliads and palm hearts that require jaw strength rather than speed.

Its habitat is a thin north-to-south ribbon of montane forest that is being cut from below by agriculture and squeezed from above by the páramo's limits, so the population exists as a chain of fragments along a mountain chain. Bears that come down to raid maize get shot, which means corridor work and crop protection matter more here than protected-area boundaries alone.