Pandas eat for as much as 15 hours a day and an grownup panda can eat 45kg of bamboo a day.

Beijing:

The discovery of panda fossils in China has helped researchers remedy the thriller of how the large species developed a “false thumb” and have become the one devoted vegetarian within the bear household.

Fossils courting again about six million years present in southwest China’s Yunnan province included a significantly enlarged wrist bone known as a radial sesamoid.

It is the oldest identified proof of the trendy large panda’s false thumb that permits it to grip and break heavy bamboo stems, scientists wrote on a analysis paper printed within the newest version of the Scientific Reports.

The fossils belong to the now-extinct historic relative of the panda known as an Ailurarcto that lived in China six to eight million years in the past.

“The giant panda is… a rare case of a large carnivore with a short, carnivorous digestive tract… that has become a dedicated herbivore,” Wang Xiaoming, curator of vertebrate palaeontology on the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, mentioned.

“The false thumb in Ailurarctos shows… for the first time, the likely timing and steps in the evolution of bamboo feeding in pandas.”

Researchers had identified in regards to the panda’s false thumb, which works just like a human thumb, for a couple of century. But the dearth of fossil proof had left unanswered questions on how and when the additional digit — not seen in another bear — advanced.

“While the giant panda’s false thumb is not the most elegant or dexterous… even a small, protruding lump at the wrist can be a modest help in preventing bamboo from slipping off bent fingers,” Wang wrote.

The fossils discovered close to Zhaotong metropolis within the north of Yunnan included a false thumb that was longer than that present in trendy pandas, however with out an inward hook on the tip.

The hook and a fleshy pad across the based mostly of the thumb advanced over time because it needed to “bear the burden of considerable body weight”, the paper mentioned.

Pandas traded the high-protein, omnivorous weight loss program of their ancestors for bamboo, that’s low in vitamins accessible year-round in South China hundreds of thousands of years in the past.

They eat for as much as 15 hours a day and an grownup panda can eat 45kg of bamboo a day. While their weight loss program is generally vegetarian, wild panda are identified to sometimes hunt small animals.

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