Latest Ailuropoda Stories
Lawrence LeBlond for redOrbit.com - Your Universe Online When we think of pandas, we often think of China, where the gentle giants are found. But not all pandas have necessarily hailed from the Far East. That’s a new theory from Spanish researchers who have unearthed the oldest fossils of what could be a close relative of the giant panda. The fossils are of two individuals, being called Kretzoiarctos beatrix, and are between 11.5 million and 12.5 million years old, according to the...
redOrbit Staff & Wire Reports - Your Universe Online A Chinese scientist claims to have discovered evidence that prehistoric people once killed and ate wild pandas, though the creatures were believed to be much smaller during that time. Wei Guangbiao, the director of the Institute of Three Gorges Paleoanthropology at a museum in the city of Chongqing, said that he had analyzed Ailuropoda melanoleuca fossils that showed that the creatures had once been "slashed to death" by humans,...
A three-year study of giant pandas published 4 April 2012 in Biology of Reproduction's Papers-in-Press reveals that reproductive seasonality exists not only in female pandas, but in male pandas as well. According to the authors of the study, this new understanding of the regulators of male reproductive function will allow continued improvement of the captive panda management program and will, one day, assist in reintroducing pandas into the wild. The giant panda is a specialized bear...
BGI has carried out deep sequence exploration on nine BACs of giant panda with traditional sanger sequencing methods. Sequences and structure information of new genes and repeats were predicted, which greatly fills the gaps of genomics study on giant panda. In addition, the nine sequences assembled based on traditional phrap methods provided as a validation resource for the de novo assembly accuracy of the whole genome shotgun sequencing reads of giant panda generated by the Illumina GA...
Latest Ailuropoda Reference Libraries
The giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca), also known as the panda, is a species of bear that is native to southwestern and central western areas of China. Its range includes mountain ranges located primarily in Sichuan province, but pandas can also be found in the Gansu and Shaanxi provinces. It once preferred a habitat within lowland areas, but human encroachment has driven the giant panda into small areas, which contain forested habitats. There are two recognized subspecies of the giant...
The red panda, Ailurus fulgens also known as the lesser panda, bear cat or fire fox, is a mostly herbivorous mammal. It is slightly larger than a domestic cat 21.65 in (55 cm) long. The red panda has semi-retractile claws and, like the giant panda, has a "false thumb" which is really an extension of the wrist bone. Thick fur on the soles of the feet offers protection from cold and hides scent glands. For many decades the taxonomic classification of both the red panda and giant panda has been...
