The giant panda is a unique animal in China, or rather, this adorable wild community of animals only exists in China. Chinese people also love this animal very much, so it is also a “national treasure” animal and the most “Chinese characteristic” animal.
China’s care and protection for giant pandas can be described as meticulous. As of October 2021, the number of wild and captive giant pandas in China has increased to 2500. As early as 2016, they have successfully removed the “hat” of endangered animals and are now classified as vulnerable species.
In fact, all humans love this animal, but other countries that want to showcase this animal must apply for leasing from our country, and special approval is required to travel. When did giant pandas first appear? Where did it first appear?
Recently, research teams from Canada and France jointly published an article on the origin of giant pandas in the journal Geobios, stating that they discovered a set of panda tooth fossils dating back about 10 million years in Hungary. Foreign media such as New Scientist subsequently reported that this discovery may support the origin of giant pandas in Europe.
In fact, this incident occurred as early as 2017 and sparked academic speculation that giant pandas originated in Europe. Prior to this, the earliest fossil discovery of giant pandas was in Yuanmou County, Yunnan Province, China. As early as 1970, a large number of skeleton fossils of ancient animals were excavated in a coal mine in the Lufeng Basin, Yunnan Province, China. Later, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences identified many of them as fossils left by the earliest ancestors of giant pandas, and determined that the time of occurrence was about 8 million years ago. Because the discovery place was Lufeng, this type of panda ancestor was named “Lufeng Original Panda”.
Later, Chinese paleontologists discovered another fossil of ancient pandas in the small rivers and bamboo sheds in the northern part of the Yuanmou Basin in Yunnan Province, later known as the “Yuanmou Giant Panda”. This provides favorable evidence that China is the origin of the giant panda.
But the tooth fossils of ancient pandas discovered in Hungary this time are about 10 million years ago (some say 11.62 million years ago), which is 2 million years earlier than the fossil of the first panda in Lufeng, Yunnan, China. However, if we only believe that the earliest origin of pandas was in Europe based on this point, it would be too far fetched! Because Hungary has only discovered two suspected panda tooth fossils from millions of years ago, and there are no other fossils to prove that they are the ancient ancestors of pandas today.
Paleontologists have suggested that the discovery of panda tooth fossils in Hungary may indicate the existence of cousins of today’s giant panda ancestors, but it cannot necessarily indicate that they are ancestors of pandas. Moreover, the premise must be that those two tooth fossils are confirmed to be pandas. “Even if this study is true, it can only be said that it is the earliest fossil of a panda like animal discovered so far. It cannot be said that it is the ancestor of giant pandas, nor does it mean that giant pandas originated in Europe,” said Fang Shengguo, director of the China Center for the Conservation of Endangered Species of Wild Fauna and Flora Germplasm and Professor of the School of Life Sciences at Zhejiang University
Does someone joke that this is trying to steal our “national treasure”? This is not easy to compete with. No matter where pandas originated, they only exist in China today. Based on scientific evidence with relatively complete fossil data, modern pandas have undergone about four periods of evolution from ancient times to the present, namely the primordial panda, the subspecies of the giant bear cat, the Babylonian giant panda, and the modern giant panda. China has its own deepening and complete chain of fossil evidence.
Fossils of giant pandas have also been found abroad, but they were found in very few places and later became extinct. The giant pandas found in China continued to evolve until about 10000 years ago, when modern giant pandas, similar to those found today, emerged. Perhaps due to their relatively narrow habitats, giant pandas had already formed a symbiotic relationship with bamboo forests, More than 90% of its recipes are made of bamboo.
The survival and evolution of modern giant pandas have also gone through many twists and turns. The late Pleistocene Ice Age caused a large number of modern giant pandas to disappear, with only a small distribution in the northwest and southwest regions of China. This has made pandas a unique animal species in China. It can be seen that China has a complete evolutionary chain of pandas for 8 million years, as evidenced by many fossils.
