Panda's ancestors hailed from Europe

• Autores: Jasmin Fox Skelly
• Localización: New scientist, ISSN 0262-4079, Nº. 3150, 2017, pág. 10
• Idioma: inglés
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• Resumen

  • An early panda lived in what is now Hungary 10 million years ago. It ate a similar diet to modern giant pandas, suggesting their odd bamboo-chewing lifestyle has survived evolutionary time. The finding also adds to evidence that they evolved in Europe, not Asia. The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) lives only in high forests in central China. Classed as a vulnerable species, it eats little but bamboo despite having a meat-eater's digestive system. Nobody really knows how the animal evolved, as few fossils of its ancestors have been found. David Begun at the University of Toronto in Canada found teeth in Rudabanya Hungary, that belonged to an early panda. They are 10 million years old, placing them in the late Miocene