Friday, March 29

They discover that the prehistoric giant panda lived in Bulgaria | Digital Trends Spanish


The ancestors of the tender Panda bear they were not at all so meek and docile, rather they were fierce and with more intimidating faces. Its about prehistoric giant pandawhich has now been found to have inhabited not only China, but also parts of Central Europe, mainly Bulgaria.

In the late 1980s, paleontologist Nikolai Spassov stumbled across fossilized animal teeth in the Bulgarian National Museum of Natural History.

It took more than 40 years to find out that they were from Agriarctos nikolovia close relative of the giant panda that lives in southwestern China today.

“I realized that I was holding in my hands the remains of a new species of fossil panda,” Spassov told Masable.

“The new species from Bulgaria is geologically the last and most evolved European species of panda,” Spassov emphasized. This discovery provides insights into the possible evolutionary paths of pandas and how their population dispersed over time, he added.

Spassov collaborated with his colleague Qigao Jiangzuo from China, and their findings were published in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. They named the newly discovered species Agriarctos nikolovi in honor of the curator Ivan Nikolov who originally collected the fossilized teeth.

Despite its fearsome appearance, due to competition with settled carnivores of the time, such as the Saber-Toothed Tiger, it fed on vegetables, but not bamboo, rather thick branches and soft leaves.

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