When did pandas start eating bamboo? Scientists have answer

New Delhi, India

A new study, which has been conducted by the Natural History Museum in Los Angeles, has found that pandas have been munching bamboo for six million years.

After the analysis of a new fossil, scientists found that the bear's ancestors also had a thumb-like 'sixth digit' to grip their favourite food.

This feature was also present in the ancestral panda genus Ailurarctos during the late Miocene period, according to the study.

The earliest evidence of the appendage is much more advance than the previous research documented evidence of the thumb-like structure to just 100,000 to 150,000 years ago.

''Deep in the bamboo forest, giant pandas traded an omnivorous diet of meat and berries to quietly consuming bamboos, a plant plentiful in the subtropical forest but of low nutrient value,'' said palaeontologist Professor Xiaoming Wang, who examined the wrist bone of an individual from the ancestral panda genus Ailurarctos.

''Tightly holding bamboo stems in order to crush them into bite sizes is perhaps the most crucial adaptation to consuming a prodigious quantity of bamboo,'' he added.

Pandas, which live mainly in temperate forests high in the mountains of southwest China, must eat around 26 to 84 pounds of it every day.

According to World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF), a newborn panda is about the size of a stick of butter, but females can grow up to about 200 pounds, while males can grow up to about 300 pounds as adults.

(With inputs from agencies)

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