“They only had a label vaguely written by hand,” Nikolai Spasov, a professor at the museum and author of a new study on the teeth, said in a press release. “It took me years to figure out what the site was and what its age was. Then it took me a long time to realize that this was an unknown fossilized giant panda.” “This discovery shows how little we still know about ancient nature and also demonstrates that historic discoveries in paleontology can lead to unexpected results, even today,” he said. While pandas are best known by their only living representative, the giant panda, there was once a range of related species that roamed across Europe and Asia. The species discovered among the museum’s artifacts was the last known panda to live in Europe, according to the news release. The researchers named it Agriarctos nikolovi after the museum’s longtime paleontologist Ivan Nikolov, who originally recorded the find. The study revealed that the bear was as large as the modern giant panda or slightly smaller. It probably ate a mostly vegetarian diet, but its meals would have been more varied than those of its only living relative, the panda, which eats only bamboo. The tips of the teeth probably weren’t hard enough to crush woody bamboo stems, suggesting the animal would have eaten softer plants, the research showed. The coal deposits in which the teeth were found provided evidence that this ancient panda lived in forested, swampy areas. Spassov and his colleague Qigao Jiangzuo, a panda expert from Peking University in China, suggested that the panda may have gone extinct during an event in which the Mediterranean basin dried up, transforming the environment. “Giant pandas are a very specialized group of bears,” Spasov said in the release. “Even if A. niklovi was not as specialized in habitat and food as the modern giant panda, fossil pandas were quite specialized and their evolution was related to moist, forested habitats,” he said. “It is possible that climate change at the end of the Miocene in southern Europe, leading to drying, had a negative effect on the existence of the last European panda.” The Miocene epoch was 23 to 5 million years ago. The research was published Sunday in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.
