The Big Panda’s Sixth Finger Proves That Evolution Works In Mysterious Ways

When it comes to food, giant pandas have a reputation for being finicky. They solely consume bamboo, and every day they may devour up to 100 lbs (45 kg) of it in the course of about 15 hours of feeding. A vast variety of foodstuffs were consumed by their forebears, including meats, and it was considered that the current panda’s all-vegetable diet developed very recently.

Even though pandas have a specific affinity for bamboo, a recent research has shown that the plant’s year-round accessibility may well have fueled their interest at minimum 6 million years back.

Current pandas (named Ailuropoda melanoleuca) having evolved a sixth digit, a type of thumb, helps them to effortlessly grab bamboo stalks & remove the foliage. Crushing bamboo stems into bite-sized pieces may be the most important adjustment for those who eat a lot of bamboo.

A lack of panda fossils indicated that researchers had no idea how the bears came to have this odd characteristic. The thumb-like feature was first discovered in the fossil record between 100,000 and 150,000 years back.

Fossil record digits from 6 to 7 million-year-old pandas provide evidence of the species’ all-bamboo nutrition and an additional finger. This Ailurarctos panda progenitor fossil was discovered in Yunnan Province throughout southwest China. It isn’t clear if the giant panda’s 6th finger has a survival purpose, but its “unique morphology” has persisted across millennia, according to the research.

The scientists were baffled by the fact that this prehistoric structure was lengthier than that of current giant pandas, who have a shortened, curled sixth finger. Because contemporary pandas must walk as well as transport their heavy bodies, scientists believe that their shortened sixth digit represents an evolutionary tradeoff.