China May Lose Panda Patent, Spain has Oldest Panda Fossils

Are the giant pandas Chinese or European, more specifically Spanish? Until recently the fossils gathered in China of the oldest remains of Ailuropodinae, the group that includes extant and extinct forms of giant panda that was between 7 to 8 years ago were considered to be the oldest fossils.

But the newly gathered fossils break that record as they are the oldest recorded ancestors of the giant pandas. The new finding led by by Juan Abella and colleagues from the National Museum of Natural Sciences and the Catalan Institute of Paleontology, Spain reveal that the fossils are of 11.6 million years old.

The 11.6 year old two fossils that include two sets of fossil jaw and teeth were discovered in southwest Europe. These fossils represent a new genus likely that is likely to be the oldest known members of the giant panda family.

It was declared that species belonged to the genus Kretzoiarctos, which means "bears of Kretzoi," which is named after paleontologist Miklos Kretzoi, who had discovered other extinct panda species.

"The new genus we describe in this paper is not only the first bear recorded in the Iberian Peninsula, but also the first of the giant panda's lineage," researcher Juan Abella, a paleontologist in Madrid at Spain's National Museum of Natural Sciences was quoted in Live Science.

The study of the remains found so far sets the origins of the giant panda lineage in the Iberian Peninsula and, later, during the Middle Miocene the pandas would have spread across Eurasia. During the Plio-Pleistocene the distribution of this group would have been reduced to China and the Southeast Asia only. According to genetic methods, the Ailuropodinae drifted apart from the other subfamilies of extant bears during the Lower Miocene, about 20 million years ago.

According to the researcher the fossil bear the characteristics of a bear adapted to eating tough plant material like bamboo.

It had a very wide variety of food available to it, from meat and fruit to plant stems or even leaves," Abella told LiveScience. "We are unaware if there was bamboo in Spain during the Middle Miocene, but there were many other similar plants associated with humid climates available for Kretzoiarctos."

"The discovery is very important to understand the origin of the lineage that leads to the giant panda millions of years after," Abella ws quoted in Light Years. "It may also help scientists to understand the adaptations in both the skull and jaw, that helps, this unique bear, to be able to feed on hard bamboo stems."

The findings were published in the journal PLOS ONE.