However their ancestors, like most bears, ate a a lot wider eating regimen that included meat, and it was thought that fashionable pandas’ unique eating regimen developed comparatively lately. Nonetheless, a brand new research finds that pandas’ specific ardour for bamboo might have originated not less than 6 million years in the past — presumably as a result of plant’s large, year-round availability.
To outlive solely on low-nutrient bamboo, fashionable pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) have developed a peculiar sixth finger, a thumb of types that permits them to simply grasp bamboo stalks and strip the leaves.
“Tightly holding bamboo stems with a purpose to crush them into chew sizes is probably essentially the most essential adaptation to consuming a prodigious amount of bamboo,” stated research writer Xiaoming Wang, curator of vertebrate paleontology on the Pure Historical past Museum of Los Angeles County, in an announcement.
Wang and his workforce recognized a lot earlier proof of pandas having an additional finger — and thus an all-bamboo eating regimen — within the type of a fossilized digit relationship again 6 to 7 million years. The fossil, unearthed in Yunnan Province in southwest China, belonged to a panda ancestor generally known as Ailurarctos.
The brand new analysis revealed Thursday within the journal Scientific Studies.
Whereas the large panda’s sixth digit isn’t as elegant or dexterous as human thumbs, the persistence of this “distinctive morphology” over thousands and thousands of years advised that it performs an important perform for survival, the research famous.
Evolutionary compromise
However what was notably puzzling to the scientists concerned within the research was that this fossilized construction was longer than these of recent large pandas, which have a shorter, hooked sixth finger.
Wang and his colleagues assume fashionable pandas’ shorter sixth digit is an evolutionary compromise between the necessity to manipulate bamboo and the necessity to stroll and carry their hefty our bodies.
“5 to 6 million years ought to be sufficient time for the panda to develop longer false thumbs, however plainly the evolutionary strain of needing to journey and bear its weight saved the ‘thumb’ quick — robust sufficient to be helpful with out being large enough to get in the best way,” stated research coauthor Denise Su, an affiliate professor on the College of Human Evolution and Social Change and analysis scientist on the Institute of Human Origins at Arizona State College, in an announcement.
