Ancient History Blog

Pygmy Pandas of Yore (ca. 3,000,000 BC)

By: The Scribe on Tuesday, September 11, 2007

Although the majority of fossil finds that come down to modern day tend to suggest that everything from insects to trees to animals were larger in ancient times, a recent discovery from a cave in China has reversed the trend, finding that – two or three million years ago – panda bears were much, much smaller than their descendants now living in Chinese forests.

It was inside a limestone cave in the Guangxi Zhuang Autonomous Region that a team of scientists discovered a small bear skull, embedded right into the wall. Further examination of the skull revealed that it did, in fact, belong to an ancient panda bear that lived in the forests of southern China. Judging by the skull’s features, these ancestral pandas were almost exactly the same in appearance as the Giant pandas who live today – except that they were about half the size!

Essentially, these miniature giant pandas were pygmy versions of the bears living today, even to the point of having already adapted a diet of bamboo – this can be identified by looking at the jaws and teeth of the skull, which actually needed to be stronger and more durable than a typical bear’s jaw, in order to grind down such tough plant material.

In addition, modern Giant pandas have what is known as a “false thumb”, which actually helps them to strip the leaves off stalks of bamboo, and scientists are hopeful that more fossils of the pygmy pandas will turn up in the near future, in order to determine whether these ancient creatures also had this mutation.

Oddly enough, about a million years ago, Giant pandas actually became bigger than the enormous sizes of today’s pandas, which seems to suggest that panda evolution has shifted back and forth in response to the bears’ environment and food supply. However, it is still strange that such a tiny panda lived several million years ago, since he would have shared the forest with other such creatures as the 4-meter-tall Stegodon, an ancestor of mammoths and later on, elephants. Also living at the same time was an ape called the Gigantopithecus, who was actually two or three times bigger than today’s gorillas.

It certainly would have been an interesting sight to see these diminutive panda bears walking amidst the giants…!

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Tomorrow: Those Knotty Incans