Big pandas as soon as roamed one other area of Earth

Within the late 1980s, paleontologist Nikolai Spassov stumbled upon fossilized animal enamel within the Nationwide Museum of Pure Historical past in Bulgaria. The fossil had a handwritten word with an indecipherable scribble. It took years for Spassov to grasp the place the fossil got here from, and what the word mentioned. 

“I spotted that I used to be holding in my arms the stays of a brand new species of fossil panda,” Spassov advised Mashable.

This animal, Agriarctos nikolovi, was a detailed relative of the enormous panda that lives in Southwest China at present, although not a direct ancestor. It is exceptional {that a} similarly-sized panda as soon as roamed present-day Europe and researchers are simply studying in regards to the species.

“The brand new species from Bulgaria is geologically the newest and probably the most advanced European species of panda,” Spassov emphasised. This discovery gives concepts in regards to the doable evolutionary paths of pandas and the way their inhabitants dispersed over time, he added. 

Spassov collaborated together with his colleague Qigao Jiangzuo from China, and their findings have been printed within the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. They named the newly found species Agriarctos nikolovi in honor of the curator Ivan Nikolov who initially collected the fossilized enamel.

Need extra science and tech information delivered straight to your inbox? Join Mashable’s Prime Tales publication at present.

They ate greater than bamboo

The tooth fossils give clues in regards to the historical panda’s whereabouts and its weight loss plan, Spassov defined.

Coal deposits on the stained fossils counsel the traditional panda lived in swampy and humid forested areas, locations the place decomposed crops ultimately (over hundreds of thousands of years) grew to become coal.

The traditional panda tooth fossils additionally counsel their feeding habits have been completely different from the long-lasting large panda we see at present in China. Right this moment’s large panda weight loss plan consists nearly fully of bamboo. However the European panda Nikolov unearthed didn’t absolutely depend on bamboo, the research discovered. That is as a result of their enamel weren’t highly effective sufficient to continually crush laborious woody bamboo stems. The traditional pandas possible consumed softer crops, they usually have been largely vegetarians. 

Intense competitors led to vegetarianism

European pandas lived alongside carnivores, Spassov mentioned. They competed with massive predators like saber-toothed tigers, hyenas, and different bears that roamed through the Miocene interval (between 23 and 5 million years in the past). Amid all this competitors, species atop the meals chain attempt to keep away from competitors by discovering completely different diets. This battle for finite energy possible drove the panda lineage in the direction of vegetarianism, Spassov defined. “The competitors was usually severe,” he mentioned.

These panda fossils are essential hole fillers. Which means, till now, scientists had a much less full image of the traditional bears which can be carefully associated to the surviving panda species in China, Juan Abella, a paleontologist at Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology in Spain, advised Mashable. Abella was not a part of the brand new research.

Abella printed an analogous research in 2012 that described the oldest identified ancestor of the enormous panda clade that after wandered Spain, utilizing fossils dated round 11.6 million years in the past. The brand new species Spassov recognized is certainly way more carefully associated to the surviving large panda, he famous. 

“Hopefully, we will resolve all these evolutive paths that lead in the direction of the extant panda,” Abella mentioned.