Bamboo bears had a different plant-based diet before they moved from Europe to China.
Pandas love bamboo, but they might not have acquired a taste for this bitter, nutty-flavored plant until recently. Paleontologists discovered the fact while studying a newly described relative to giant pandas, namedwhich hung out in Europe a few million years ago and sported a smaller set of teeth than their modern family. The findings, published on July 31 in the, suggest the panda species was likely the last to live in Europe.
The fossil teeth were first unearthed in the late 1970s in northwestern Bulgaria in coal deposits that blackened the chompers. Because the Bulgarian National Museum of National History did not clearly list the specimens in their catalog of fossilized treasures, they remained untouched in storage until an accidental discovery by staff 40 years later.
“They had only one label written vaguely by hand,” Nikolai Spassov, a paleontologist and museum professor at Sofia University in California, explained in a. “It took me many years to figure out what the locality was and what its age was. Then it also took me a long time to realize that this was an unknown fossil giant panda.”
The upper canine and upper molar of the dental sample trace back to a species closely related to today’s giant pandas, which only live in southwest China. The ursids roamed the forested and swampy areas of Europe nearly 6 million years ago in the Miocene epoch.had smaller teeth than present-day pandas, but bigger ones than other panda species of that time period. The study authors hypothesize that through evolution, the mammals’ canines and molars likely grew to protect them from predators.
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