The Past and Present of Giant Pandas
Giant pandas, everyone knows they are national treasures, their cute appearance is loved by people. Today, let's talk about the past and present of giant pandas
Giant pandas and black bears are close relatives to polar bears. In today's terms, they are like old friends with a bite force only second to that of polar bears. They are on par with brown bears and can climb trees over 20 meters high. In 2009, Chinese scientists completed the sequencing of the giant panda genome (Nature2009), which supports that giant pandas should belong to the order of carnivores, the bear family, as a subspecies. Over millions of years of evolution, it lost a gene called T1R1, and thus stopped eating meat and switched to eating bamboo
That means polar bears and pandas are ancestors. Think about it over millions of years of evolution, a polar bear was a dominant species, and a cute panda lived in the south. Despite having the same ancestor, they achieved different lives
Giant pandas were not called giant pandas in ancient times, they were called Shihuo, which is said to have been the mount of (Shi You), one of the ancestors who fought against emperors Yellow Emperor and Emperor Yan. After Shi You was defeated, his mount was preserved, and it became our national treasure panda today, living off selling cuteness
Before they were recognized as national treasures, giant pandas were also a no-contest name in the wild, because they belong to the bear family. They have a body length of 1.2-1.8 meters, a tail length of 10-12 centimeters, and a weight of 80-120 kilograms. The heaviest can reach 180 kilograms. Their bite force is amazing. If a common (shar wolf) or tiger encounters it, it would not provoke it. It was too powerful, otherwise it would become someone's meal. Later, after the founding of the People's Republic of China, they became national treasures along with other animals like the saber-toothed tiger, which have all become fossils. Only it survived, so it was called a living fossil by zoologists
