In 1923, Charles William Andrews suggested that the Nandi bear may be a surviving representative of the extinct Chalicothere. In the 1930s Louis Leakey suggested that Nandi Bear descriptions matched that of the Chalicothere, though chalicotheres were herbivores. The Chalicothere hypothesis was later abandoned. In 2000, paleontologist Louis L. Jacobs commented that "if chalicotheres existed now, they would have been found out just like the giant forest hog was." He concluded that "if there is anything to the Nandi-bear story besides imagination, I suspect it may be the word-of-mouth description of gorillas passed across the continent from areas where they live to areas where they do not."