Discovered in the bowels of the Bulgarian National Museum of Natural History, two tooth fossils discovered in the 1970s helped identify a new species of European giant panda thought to be the closest relative of the modern giant panda.Ailuropod melanoleuca), a famous lover of bamboo.
Two blackened teeth
Initially, two kenotes of the upper jaw (a carnassial tooth and a canine) were found. paleontologist Ivan Nikolov, in northwestern Bulgaria, in a coal mine that turned them black. Then they were kept in the National Museum of Natural History in Sofia. then found Nikolai Spasov, museum researcher. The latter conducted research to understand the circumstances of their discovery and analyzed them. It was he who realized that they belonged to an ancient species of an unknown giant panda, now called Agriarktos Nikolovi.
Discovered in the bowels of the Bulgarian National Museum of Natural History, two tooth fossils discovered in the 1970s helped identify a new species of European giant panda thought to be the closest relative of the modern giant panda.Ailuropod melanoleuca), a famous lover of bamboo.
Two blackened teeth
Initially, two kenotes of the upper jaw (a carnassial tooth and a canine) were found. paleontologist Ivan Nikolov, in northwestern Bulgaria, in a coal mine that turned them black. Then they were kept in the National Museum of Natural History in Sofia. then found Nikolai Spasov, museum researcher. The latter conducted research to understand the circumstances of their discovery and analyzed them. It was he who realized that they belonged to an ancient species of an unknown giant panda, now called Agriarktos Nikolovi.
pandas belong ailuropodinsBear Family Tribe, bearish. Although this group of animals is best known for its only living member, the giant panda, these specimens once roamed Europe and Asia in large numbers. Their origin is still a mystery, and paleontologists are considering two hypotheses. This is due to the birth in Asia and secondary migration in Europe, or, conversely, with the appearance in Europe (where some of the oldest specimens are found) and the later departure to Asia, where the group could specialize. This new species and the authors of a study about it published in the journal Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology, I lean towards the second explanation..
More varied food
Fossil fang size similar to the modern giant panda, indicating that these two mammals were about the same size, about 1 m 50 cm and weighing one hundred kilograms. Agriarktos Nikolovi lived in wooded and swampy environments and competed with many other predators, which could explain its largely vegetarian diet, albeit a much more varied one than that of the giant panda. The point of its two teeth is also probably not developed enough to crush woody stems such as bamboo. A. Nikolovi fed without a doubt softer and more varied plant mass. The exceptional appetite for bamboo would have instilled in giant pandas much later, and this represents a food hyperspecialization acquired in Asia.
The authors speculate that this European panda may have gone extinct in a climatic event, likely due to the “Messinian salinity crisis”.. This crisis spanned a period of 600,000 years and took place between 5.96 and 5.33 million years ago. During this, the Mediterranean dried up one or more times, probably due to the closure of the Strait of Gibraltar, resulting in a hotter and drier climate throughout the Mediterranean basin.