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Giant pandas may have only recently switched to eating mostly bamboo

Author: Jeremy Rehm / Source: Science News

panda bear
BAMBOO FANATIC Although giant pandas are well equipped for chowing down on bamboo — including having a special “thumb” used to hold stalks — these bears weren’t always this specialized. In fact, their bamboo obsession may have occurred in only the last 5,000 years.

When it comes to deciding what’s for breakfast, lunch or dinner, pandas have it easy: Bamboo, bamboo and more bamboo. But that wasn’t always the case.

Although modern giant pandas (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) chow almost exclusively on bamboo in the mountain forests of central China, these bears’ diet was much broader not so long ago, researchers report online January 31 in Current Biology. Analyses using chemical signatures from bones and teeth of both ancient and modern pandas indicate the bears’ hyperdependence on bamboo could have developed as recently as about 5,000 years ago. That’s roughly 2 million years later than previously assumed from molecular and paleontological data.

“It has been widely accepted that giant pandas have exclusively fed on bamboo for a long time, but our results show the opposite,” says Fuwen Wei, a wildlife ecologist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences’ Institute of Zoology in Beijing. “That made us excited.”

Wei and his colleagues compared the relative abundance of isotopes — atoms of the same element but with a different number of neutrons in the nucleus — in modern and fossil animals, including pandas. Animal diets contain different amounts of naturally occurring “heavy” and “light” isotopes of carbon, oxygen and nitrogen that are then incorporated into bones, hair, nails and teeth. The…

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