JAKARTA - The discovery of two teeth stored in a Bulgarian museum has identified a giant panda species that existed in Europe six million years ago.
It began with the discovery of fossilized upper molars and tusks in the late 1970s in coal deposits, then held in the collection of the National Museum of Natural History of Bulgaria for more than four decades.
"They only had one label that was written vaguely by hand," Nikolai Spassov, a professor at the museum and author of a new study on teeth, said in a news release.
"It took me years to figure out what tooth it was and how old it was. Then it took me a long time to realize that this is an unknown giant panda fossil," he continued.
"This discovery demonstrates how little we know about the primeval realm, suggesting 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 were once various related species that roamed throughout Europe and Asia.
The species found via museum artifacts is the last known panda living in Europe, according to a news release.
The researchers named it Agrirctos nikolovi, after the museum paleontologist Ivan Nikolov who first cataloged the find.
The study revealed that the animal was as big as a modern giant panda or slightly smaller. Presumably vegetarian, but his diet is more varied than his current relatives who only eat bamboo.
The tips of the teeth probably weren't hard enough to crush woody bamboo stalks, suggesting the animal was eating softer plants, the study found.
The coal deposits where the teeth were found provide evidence that these ancient pandas inhabited forest and swamp areas.
Spassov and co-author Qigao Jiangzuo, a panda specialist from Peking University in China, propose pandas may have gone extinct during an event in which the Mediterranean basin dried up, changing the surrounding environment.
"Giant pandas are a very special group of bears," Spassov wrote in the release.
"Even if A. niklovi was not specialized in habitat and diet like the modern giant panda, the panda fossils were quite specialized and their evolution was linked to moist forest habitats," he said.
"Possible 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."
To note, the Miocene Period lasted about 23 million to 5 million years ago. The research was published in the 'Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology'.
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