An artist's interpretation of the new species of European panda. (Image credit: © Velizar Simeonovski, Chicago)
LiveScience has a story about European pandas. A new species of panda from Bulgaria called Agriarctos nikolovi lived about 10 million years ago. The fossil teeth show it had a vegetarian diet and would likely have struggled to eat bambo which is the main food of modern giant pandas, Ailuropoda melanoleuca. The research was published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
A pair of fossil teeth in a museum collection recently revealed when pandas last roamed Europe.
When researchers examined the teeth, which had been kept in storage for around 40 years, they discovered that the fossils belonged to a never-before-seen species of ancient European panda. The newfound species, which is a close relative of modern giant pandas, roamed the continent around 6 million years ago and was likely the last of Europe's pandas.
The teeth — an upper canine and an upper molar — were originally unearthed during the late 1970s from a site in northwestern Bulgaria, but they ended up in storage at the Bulgarian National Museum of Natural History in Sofia. The teeth were never properly cataloged, and as a result they were left untouched for decades. But when museum staff recently stumbled upon the unusual teeth, they decided to investigate further.
