A species of big panda lived in jap Europe 6 million years in the past, in line with scientists who studied the animal’s fossilized tooth.

The discovery got here from forgotten fossilized tooth, initially found within the late Seventies in Bulgaria’s Sredna Gora mountain vary. The tooth—an higher carnassial tooth and an higher canine—had been amassing mud on a shelf within the Bulgarian National Museum of Natural History till now.

A workforce of researchers not too long ago studied the tooth and decided they belong to the genus Agriarctos, which distinguishes the long-gone bears from the extant big panda, a member of the group Ailuropoda. The workforce’s findings in regards to the historic tooth have been published this week within the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

The extinct panda is now named Agriarctos nikolovi, after the paleontologist who added the bear stays to the museum’s assortment. The bear lived in the course of the Miocene epoch, which ended about 5.3 million years in the past, and, based mostly on the dimensions of its tooth, it was most likely in regards to the dimension of a contemporary big panda.

Nikolai Spassov, a paleontologist on the Bulgarian National Museum of Natural History, mentioned in a Taylor & Francis release that A. nikolovi is an in depth relative of contemporary pandas, not a direct ancestor.

“[The teeth] had only one label written vaguely by hand,” Spassov mentioned within the launch. “It took me many years to figure out what the locality was and what its age was. Then it also took me a long time to realize that this was an unknown fossil giant panda.”

The bear’s tooth—blackened by the coal-rich deposits wherein they have been discovered—have been studied alongside tooth from 9 different bear species that vary from southeastern China to jap France. Besides the truth that there may be scant proof for bamboo (the staple meals of contemporary panda bears) in historic Bulgaria, evaluation of A. nikolovi’s tooth indicated the animal would’ve had a tricky time breaking down bamboo’s woody stems.

The tooth evaluation revealed that A. nikolovi’s tooth have been comparable in form and dimension to these of extant pandas, with a big canine tooth and chopping edges on its premolar. That led the analysis workforce to posit A. nikolovi was possible additionally a vegetarian bear. However, the cusps on the tooth didn’t seem sturdy sufficient to chew up bamboo’s strong, woody stems, so the workforce thinks the animal most likely grazed on softer plant materials.

As to why pandas advanced to eat largely vegetation, the going theory is that there wasn’t a lot competitors for the considerable grass. One recent study means that the bears might have tailored a bamboo-dominated food plan extra not too long ago than beforehand thought.

Pandas additionally use their tooth to guard themselves in opposition to different bears, like in fights over mates. Similarly, A. nikolovi’s tooth most likely served as a superb protection in opposition to different animals within the swampy Miocene forest.

The researchers imagine the ancestor of panda bears might have come from someplace in southern Asia—someplace between modern-day Afghanistan and Vietnam—and dispersed from there into subspecies in China and subspecies like A. nikolovi in Europe. However, the proof for probably the most historic pandas comes from Europe, so it’s doable that the primary pandas emerged there and moved earlier than the bears diversified.

It’s not sure why the Bulgarian pandas are actually extinct, although the workforce suspects local weather adjustments within the area—particularly, a interval often known as the Messianian salinity disaster, throughout which the Mediterranean area dried up.

“Even if A. nikolovi was not as specialized in habitats and food as the modern giant panda, fossil pandas were specialized enough and their evolution was related to humid, wooded habitats,” Sassov mentioned within the launch. “It is likely that climate change at the end of the Miocene in southern Europe, leading to aridification, had an adverse effect on the existence of the last European panda.”

If researchers can get their arms on even older panda tooth, maybe the evolution of those distinctive bears will be untangled, together with why solely species stays on Earth right this moment. (Red pandas, regardless of their title and love of bamboo, are something else entirely.)

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