Europe’s cuddly bears
WITH their distinctive black and white furry coats, giant pandas are adorable.
No wonder the World Wildlife Fund adopted them as its symbol. Giant pandas belong to the bear family (Ursidae), but while all other bears are carnivores, pandas eat virtually nothing but bamboo. This diet restricts them to the high forests of central China, where bamboo is abundant, and means that globally they are the rarest and most vulnerable bear species. So how and where did this extraordinary bear evolve?
Fossils eight million years old from China suggest that pandas have lived there since their evolutionary split from other bears, and estimates suggest that the modern giant pan- das we know and love evolved in China about two million years ago. Yet radiocarbon dating of recent fossil finds indicates a geographically much wider evolutionary history.
In 2012, teeth from a giant panda ancestor dating from 11.6 million years ago were uncovered in Spain, and now scientists have found teeth from another early giant panda that lived in the region of modern-day Hungary some 10 million years ago. From the shape and wear patterns of the teeth, scientists established that these ancient bears were herbivores, just like modern-day pandas.
Since the European fossils pre-date the Chinese ones by two to three million years, they cast doubt on China being the panda’s ancestral home.
Only DNA analysis can reveal the true relationship between today’s pandas and these ancient bears, but scientists suggest that giant pandas evolved from ancestral, carnivore bears in Europe and for a while roamed the forests of both Europe and Asia. Whatever the correct interpretation, clearly the European panda has long since become extinct. For an animal that probably thrived in lush, warm forests, the loss this habitat around five million years ago, when Europe became cooler and drier, most likely caused its demise.
Nevertheless, I’m sure that Edinburgh Zoo residents Tian Tian and Yang Guang (Sweetie and Sunshine), the only two giant pandas in the UK, would be heartened to learn that they are not so far from home as they imagined.