But their ancestors, like most bears, ate a wider range of foods including meat, The exclusive diet of the modern panda is thought to have evolved relatively recently. However, a new study He found that pandas’ love of bamboo may have emerged at least 6 million years ago – perhaps because of the plant’s year-round availability.
In order to survive solely on low-nutrient bamboo, modern pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) have developed a peculiar sixth finger, a type of thumb that allows them to easily grasp bamboo stalks and peel off leaves.
“Tight gripping a bamboo stalk to crush it into bite size is probably the most important adaptation to consuming large amounts of bamboo,” said study author Xiaoming Wang, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Los Angeles County Museum of Natural History. statement.
Wang and his team identified early evidence of extra legs for pandas – and thus a whole bamboo diet – in the form of fossil figures that are 6 to 7 million years old. The fossil found in Yunnan Province, southwest China, belongs to an ancestor of the panda known as Ailurarctos.
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The new research was published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports.
The study shows that while the giant panda’s sixth finger is not as graceful or dexterous as a human thumb, the persistence of this “typical morphology” over millions of years suggests that it played an important function for survival.
evolutionary compromise
But what really baffled the scientists involved in the study was that this fossil skeleton was even longer than that of the modern giant panda, which has a shorter, hanging sixth toe.
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Wang and his colleagues think that the sixth digit is the shortest in modern pandas This is an evolutionary compromise between the need to manipulate bamboo and the need to walk and carry their heavy bodies.
“Five to six million years should be enough time for pandas to develop a longer pseudo-thumb, but apparently evolutionary pressures from needing to travel and bear its weight kept the thumb short – strong enough to be useful without getting big. ,” said Dennis Su, co-author of the study. “Enough to get in the way,” R., a professor in the School of Human Evolution and Social Change and a research scientist at the Institute of Human Origin at Arizona State University. , said in a statement.
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