Thanks to LEGO.com and the LEGO Store—presenting
the LEGO Ideas Tree House—for their support of PBS. The mountain forests of China are the last
home of a very peculiar bear indeed: the giant panda. It’s one of the most recognizable mammals
in the world, with its distinctive black-and-white coat and its adorably round physique. And it’s been confusing researchers ever
since it was first described by Western scientists in the 1800s. For one thing, the giant panda is mostly a
committed herbivore that specializes in eating bamboo, which is not very bear-like behavior. It also shares its name, its diet, part of
its habitat, and an enlarged wrist bone that functions like a thumb with the more common
red panda. But it turns out, the two pandas are actually
not that closely related! And while it used to range over much of East
Asia, today it’s found only in a few pockets of mountain habitat in central China. But oddly enough, its earliest relatives actually
lived in Europe, their fossils having been found in Hungary and Spain. Everything we discover about the giant panda
just seems to lead to more questions. Like why isn’t it more closely related to the
red panda, if they have so much in common? And how does a bear -- which is a member of
the order Carnivora -- evolve into an herbivore? How can it survive on bamboo, if it evolved
from omnivores? Like, how do pandas even work? Despite how it looks, nothing about the history
of the giant panda is black and white. But it is … kinda fuzzy. Now, because the giant panda is so odd in
so many ways -- from its very picky diet to its weird, extra-thumb thing -- scientists
for a long time wondered: Are pandas even bears? And it wasn’t until the late 20th century
that we finally got an answer -- that’s how weird these animals are. The giant panda saga started in 1869, when
it was given its first scientific name by a French missionary and naturalist based in
China. He called it Ursus melanoleucus -- literally,
the black and white bear. So, we know he thought it was a bear, because
he put it in the genus “Ursus,” with most of the other living bears. But only a year later, another researcher
examined a giant panda skeleton and decided it was more like a red panda than a bear! So he changed its scientific name to Ailuropoda
melanoleuca, which is what it’s still called today. But the controversy over the panda’s bearishness
continued for more than 100 years. The experts who thought it was a bear pointed
to a ton of similarities between giant pandas and other bears, found throughout their entire
bodies - in their teeth, skeletons, muscles, and organ systems. But the scientists who thought it was closer
to red pandas focused on their similarities in feeding behavior and their shared habitat. Giant pandas and red pandas live in the same
places and eat the same thing: bamboo. It wasn’t until the early 1980s that the
first genetic analysis of giant pandas was done. It looked at the number of different mutations
per gene in pandas and other carnivores. The more differences per gene there are, the
longer those two species have been separated reproductively, which means they’re more
distantly related. These early DNA studies suggested that the
giant panda was only a distant relative of the red panda. And it found that the red panda lineage actually
branched off somewhere between two different families - the one that contains skunks, and
the one that includes raccoons and their relatives. So, sorry no! Scientifically speaking, it’s not super
accurate to describe a raccoon as a trash panda. But there is a relationship there, at least
with red pandas! It wasn’t until studies were done in the
late 2000s of the giant panda’s whole genome that it was confirmed that the giant panda
was indeed a bear. And it turned out that its closest living
relative isn’t the red panda; it’s the South American spectacled bear, which belongs
to the second-oldest branch on the bear family tree. And the oldest branch of the bear family? That’s where the pandas came from. According to molecular clock studies of the
genomes of the bear family, the giant panda lineage originated around 20 million years
ago, in the early Miocene Epoch, when its branch split off from all of the other living
bears. But, we don’t know where this happened exactly. Since pandas today are found only in China,
for a long time it was thought that they originated in East Asia. But based on fossils from several different
sites, it looks like they might’ve actually evolved in... Europe. Or, at the very least, pandas had some close
European cousins, with whom they shared a common ancestor. The oldest, most basal member of the giant
panda lineage comes from deposits in northern Spain dating back 11.6 million years. There, scientists have discovered the remains
of a bear known as Kretzoiarctos Its fossils consist of only teeth and jaws,
but its premolars have some features, like additional little cusps, that researchers
think are adaptations to a more herbivorous diet. So it seems that the giant panda’s taste
for plants goes pretty far back in its evolutionary history. Just a little younger than Kretzoiarctos is
another European panda known as Miomaci pannonicum, and it comes from deposits dating back about
10 million years in both Hungary and Spain. It too is only known from teeth and jaws,
but the teeth of Miomaci have microscopic pits and scratches in them that are kinda
like the patterns seen on the teeth of modern giant pandas. So some researchers think it might’ve had
a similar diet and lifestyle as the giant panda. And a third European genus is known from scrappy
remains from France, Germany, and Hungary that overlap in time with the other two panda
ancestors. So for a few million years, we’ve got panda
relatives living throughout central and western Europe. But then, something strange and frustrating
happens. There seems to be a panda hiatus in the fossil
record. The next time they show up is in China,
millions of years later. There we’ve found two species belonging
to the genus known as Ailurarctos. They date to between 6 million and 8 million
years ago, and both are only known, again, from teeth. And those teeth suggest that those bears were
smaller than the modern giant panda and were probably more omnivorous. They had broad lower molar crowns, like living
bears, but with a wrinkled pattern to their enamel, which is what the giant panda has. So their teeth look like a transitional step
between those of more typical bears and those of the highly specialized panda. Then! About 2 million years ago, we finally find
the earliest known fossils of bears that truly belong to the same genus as the modern giant
panda, the genus Ailuropoda. These fossils come from cave sites in southern
China, and the most complete of them is a skull that has a lot of similarities to the
skulls of living pandas. This fossil panda was smaller than its modern
relatives and maybe had a less powerful bite. But it also had extra-cuspy teeth that were
specialized for breaking down fibrous foods. But experts aren’t sure about when pandas
adopted the habit they’re most famous for: relying on bamboo as their main source of
food. One recent study compared the isotopes of
carbon and oxygen preserved in the tooth enamel of modern and ancient pandas. Carbon can tell you about an animal’s diet,
while oxygen can tell you about the climate it lived in. And the carbon values suggested that ancient
pandas were herbivores by at least 2.5 million years ago -- but the chemistry wasn’t a
perfect match with modern, bamboo-eating pandas. The teeth also had a much wider range of oxygen
values, which means they probably lived in a lot more different kinds of environments
than pandas do today. So it looks like ancient pandas had broader
diets and were more ecologically flexible than their living descendants. But modern pandas are definitely all about
that bamboo - which again, for a bear, is just really weird. See, the giant panda has the GI tract, the
digestive enzymes, and the gut microbes of a carnivore. It doesn’t have the multi-chambered stomach
of cattle or produce the enzymes that other herbivores use to break down cellulose, which
is the key ingredient in bamboo and other plants. So, for a long time, the panda’s diet was
considered a sort of evolutionary riddle. But a paper published in 2019 seems to have
figured out how they’ve been able to survive on a mostly bamboo diet. Researchers sampled the shoots and leaves
of the different kinds of bamboo plants that a select group of pandas was eating throughout
the year. Then they sampled the bears’ poop for a
before-and-after picture of the nutrients that they were taking in and putting out. And the researchers found that, at the molecular
level, the pandas’ diet looked more like a carnivore’s than like a herbivore’s. Specifically, their ratio of macronutrients
-- like proteins, carbs, and lipids - resembled those of meat eaters. It turns out that pandas switch which type
of bamboo and which parts of the plant they eat throughout the year, to maximize protein
and minimize fiber! So the percentage of energy that they get
from protein is actually equivalent to the diet of WOLVES. Pandas are basically vegan gym bros. So maybe the transition from an omnivorous,
bear-like ancestor to the gentle bamboo eaters we know today wasn’t such a stretch for
the giant panda, after all. From its Early Miocene origins near the base
of the bear lineage, the giant panda has come a long way. Taxonomically, it went from a red panda relative
to a true bear. Geographically, it went from its ancestors’
first appearance in Europe, all the way to the mountains of China, where it survives
today. Physically, it went from a dog-sized omnivore
to a, well, bear-sized herbivore that still packs in the protein, in an very unexpected
way. If the evolutionary history of the giant panda remains kind of fuzzy, its future isn’t
very clear either. It was once considered to be on the brink
of extinction, but in 2014 there were more than 1800 counted in the wild -- a viable,
but still vulnerable, number. Those false-thumbed, bamboo-eating mammals
of Central China are the last remaining characters in the story of the world’s most un-bear-like
bear. Thanks to LEGO.com and the LEGO Store— presenting the LEGO Ideas Tree House —for their support
of PBS. The LEGO Ideas Tree House set aims to celebrate
the seasons of the natural world with an interchangeable set of leaves – green for summer and yellow/
brown for fall. The 3,036 piece set is designed for ambitious
builders and includes removable treetop and cabin roofs, a wind-up crane feature, and
a landscape base with a picnic table and bonfire. There’s even a bathtub! As part of the LEGO Group’s commitment to
make products using sustainable material by 2030, the 180 tree foliage elements are made
from plant-based polyethylene plastic using sustainably sourced sugarcane. Click the link in the description to learn
more. Weird extra thumbs up to this month’s Eontologists:
Patrick Seifert, Jake Hart, Jon Davison Ng, Sean Dennis, Hollis, and Steve! To join them and become an Eonite go to patreon.com/eons
and pledge your support! And thank you for joining me in the Konstantin
Haase Studio. Be sure to subscribe at youtube.com/eons.
