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The giant panda is called “China’s National Treasure”, the ambassador of the World Wildlife Fund, enjoys abundant government protection resources in China, and shoulders the heavy responsibility of “Panda Diplomacy”.
Giant pandas have lived on the earth for at least 8 million years. Their habitats are in the dense bamboo forests of 2600-3500 meters above sea level in the mountainous areas of Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu, China. They are carnivorous mammals, but they eat bamboo as their staple food.
It is generally believed that giant pandas are endemic to China, but the latest research shows that 6 million years ago, there were giant pandas in the European continent.
The Bulgarian National Museum of Natural History lays two fossils, handwritten labels stating they were discovered in a coal field in northwestern Bulgaria by a paleontologist named Ivan Nikolov in the 1970s of.
Those were the teeth of two animals that had been in the museum’s fossil collection for about half a century without much attention.
However, their fortunes have changed dramatically recently, all because of a professor of paleontology at the museum named Nikolai Spassov and his students. They noticed the two fossil teeth, re-examined, evaluated, and finally concluded that they belonged to a close relative of the giant panda, which lived about 6 million years ago.
Strictly speaking, it was a giant panda that lived on European soil in what is now Bulgaria in the late Miocene.
image source,Getty Images
image source,Getty Images
While it is known that giant pandas once roamed Europe, there has been intense debate over whether and how they migrated from Asia to Europe. The information that fossil teeth can provide is quite limited, especially if the original label is blurred and the clues are vague.
This is the case with the two fossil teeth at the Bulgarian Museum of Natural History. Professor Spasov said that it took many years to determine the location and the age of the deity, and finally it took a long time to determine that the deity was a giant panda.
The giant panda was once listed as an endangered species. After vigorous rescue and protection, the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) downgraded the giant panda from “endangered” to “vulnerable” a few years ago, causing some objections in China.
The endangerment levels of species are divided from high to low: extinct, extinct in the wild, critically endangered, endangered, vulnerable, near-threatened, and non-threatened.
The Daily Life of Sichuan’s “Giant Panda Nanny”
BBC Science Focus reports that Spasov and Jiang Zuoqigao from Peking University said in their research report that there is reason to believe that giant pandas live in swampy and forest-covered areas, and the coal field where fossils were unearthed 6 million years ago was exactly the same. Such a landscape.
At that time, giant pandas were also mainly vegetarian. Unlike modern giant pandas, however, their staple food is not bamboo.
The basis is that their teeth do not appear to be strong enough, and there is little evidence of bamboo growth in the area’s fossil record at that time.
The newly discovered species should not be the direct ancestor of modern giant pandas, and are similar or slightly smaller, and belong to close relatives, the research report said.
It was named Agriarctos nikolovi in honor of the person who first discovered the fossil.
image source,Getty Images
Giant panda plane
Panda Diplomacy
The giant panda is called “China’s National Treasure”, the ambassador of the World Wildlife Fund, enjoys abundant government protection resources in China, and shoulders the heavy responsibility of “Panda Diplomacy”.
The term panda diplomacy refers specifically to the practice of the Chinese government giving or leasing pandas as valuable gifts to other countries from the 1940s to the 21st century to enhance friendly relations. Empress Dowager Wu Zetian presented two giant pandas as a gift to the Japanese Emperor Tianwu.
In the 1940s, the government of the Republic of China presented two male giant pandas, Panda and Pandi, to the United States, and a female giant panda, Miss United, to the United Kingdom.
From the 1950s to 1982, the government of the People’s Republic of China gave giant pandas as a national gift in official or private names to those countries that maintained good diplomatic relations with China and with which China hoped to establish diplomatic relations, including the Soviet Union, North Korea, the United States, and the United Kingdom. Nine countries including France, Germany, Japan, Spain and Mexico have accepted 24 giant pandas donated by China.
Since 1982, China has stopped giving away giant pandas to foreign countries in response to a global call to protect endangered species. Since then, giant pandas have gone abroad on a global tour and lease.
Due to the scarcity of regulation and regulation, and the potential for huge profits, commercial giant panda leasing has brought many problems, including hunting wild giant pandas, exacerbating endangered problems, and eventually leading to the US and Chinese governments and international intervention to prohibit commercial leasing , but can still be leased in the name of scientific research, reproduction, and protection.
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