Tag: pandas
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PBS Eons: Pandas in North America?
PBS Eons has a new video. Pandas in America?!? How? How did a relative of the red panda end up in North America? What can this tell us about how long ago – and how many times – North America was connected to Europe and Asia?
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Paleontologists find omnivorous ancestor of the giant panda, revealing it was not always just a bamboo eater
Phys.org has a nice summary of a new paper in the journal Papers in Palaeontology and Geobios, which sheds light on the ancestry of the giant panda. The fossils were found at the Hammerschmiede clay pit, a fossil site in southern Germany that dates to about 11.5 million years ago. Fossil teeth of Kretzoiarctos beatrix, which is…
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Europe’s last pandas were giant weaklings who couldn’t even eat bamboo
LiveScience has a story about European pandas. A new species of panda from Bulgaria called Agriarctos nikolovi lived about 10 million years ago. The fossil teeth show it had a vegetarian diet and would likely have struggled to eat bambo which is the main food of modern giant pandas, Ailuropoda melanoleuca. The research was published…