According to scientists who study giant panda tooth fossils, a species of giant panda lived in Eastern Europe 6 million years ago.
Sat , +08:00 January 13 , 2024
The discovery comes from a forgotten tooth fossil originally discovered in Bulgaria's Sredna Gora mountains in the late 1970s. Until now, these teeth (an upper half-cleft tooth and an upper canine tooth) have been gathering dust on the shelves of the Bulgarian National Museum of Natural History.
A team of researchers recently studied the teeth and determined they belonged to the genus Agriarctos, which distinguishes these long-lost bears from living giant pandas, which belong to the genus Ailuropoda. The team's findings about the ancient teeth have been published this week in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
The extinct panda is now named "Agriarctos nikolovi" after the paleontologist who added the bear's remains to the museum's collection. The bear lived during the Miocene Epoch, which ended about 5.3 million years ago, and based on the size of its teeth, it was probably about the same size as a modern giant panda.
Nikolai Spassov, a paleontologist at the National Museum of Natural History in Bulgaria, said that "Agriarctos nikolovi" is a close relative of the modern giant panda, not a direct ancestor.
Paleontologist Nikolay Spasov said: "The preserved tooth fossil only has a vague handwritten label. It took me many years to figure out where it was and how old it was. And then it took me a lot of time to figure out where it was and how old it was. It took time to realize that this was an unknown giant panda fossil."
The bear's teeth, which were discovered stained black by coal-rich deposits, were studied along with teeth from nine other species of bears ranging from southeastern China to eastern France. In addition to the lack of evidence of bamboo in ancient Bulgaria, a staple of the modern panda's diet, analysis of Agriarctos nikolovi's teeth showed that the animal had difficulty breaking down bamboo's woody stems.
Analysis of the teeth showed that the teeth of "Agriarctos nikolovi" were similar in shape and size to those of living giant pandas, with a large canine tooth and cutting edges on the front cleft teeth. This led the team to believe that Agriarctos nikolovi might also have been a vegetarian bear. However, the fangs on the teeth don't appear to be strong enough to chew through the bamboo's thick, woody stems, so the team believes the animal may have fed on softer plant material.
As for why pandas evolved to eat primarily plants, the current theory is that there wasn't much competition for the abundance of plants. A recent study suggests that these bears may have adapted to a diet of bamboo later than previously thought.
Pandas also use their teeth to protect themselves from other bears, such as when competing for mates. Likewise, the teeth of "Agriarctos nikolovi" likely served as a good means of defense in Miocene swamp forests.
Researchers believe the panda's ancestors may have come from somewhere in southern Asia (between present-day Afghanistan and Vietnam) and dispersed from there into a subspecies in China and a subspecies of "Agriarctos nikolovi" in Europe. However, the oldest evidence of pandas comes from Europe, so it's possible that the first pandas appeared there and migrated before bears diversified.
Currently, it's unclear what caused Bulgaria's giant pandas to go extinct, although the team suspects climate change in the region — specifically a period known as the "Messinian Salinity Crisis," during which the Mediterranean Sea dried out.
"Even if 'Agriarctos nikolovi' was not as specialized as modern giant pandas in terms of habitat and food, fossil pandas were specialized enough that their evolution was closely related to wet, wooded habitats," said paleontologist Nikolay Spasov. Geographically related. It is likely that climate changes in southern Europe at the end of the Miocene caused droughts that adversely affected the existence of the last European panda."
If researchers can find older panda teeth, perhaps the evolution of these unique bears can be unraveled, and why only a single species remains on Earth today. (Red pandas (Ailurus fulgens), despite their name and love of bamboo, are another story entirely.)