New discovery of possibly the last panda species in Europe

image: Reconstruction of A. nikolovi sp. Nov. from Bulgaria. Artwork by Velizar Simeonovski, Chicago.
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Credit: © Velizar Simeonovski, Chicago

Tracing the forested wetlands of Bulgaria some six million years ago, a new species of panda has been discovered by scientists who say today is the last known and “most evolved” European giant panda.

Excavated from the bowels of Bulgaria’s National Museum of Natural History, two tooth fossils originally discovered in the eastern European country in the late 1970s, provide new evidence of a sizable relative of the modern giant panda. Unlike today’s iconic black and white bears, they did not rely on pure bamboo.

“Although not a direct ancestor of the modern genus of giant pandas, it is a close relative,” explains Museum Professor Nikolai Spassov, whose findings were published today in a peer-reviewed publication. Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology.

“This discovery demonstrates how little we still know about the primeval realm and demonstrates also that historic discoveries in paleontology can yield unexpected results, even today.”

The upper carnival teeth, and upper canines, were originally cataloged by paleontologist Ivan Nikolov, who added them to the museum’s treasure trove of fossils when they were unearthed in northwestern Bulgaria. This new species is named Agriarktos nikolovi in his honor.

“They had only one label that was written vaguely by hand,” recalls Professor Spassov. “It took me years to figure out what a locality is and how old it is. Then it also took me a long time to realize that this is an unknown giant panda fossil.”

The coal deposits where the teeth were found – which has given them their blackened hue – suggest that these ancient pandas inhabited forest and swamp areas.

There, during the Miocene, they most likely ate a vegetarian diet – but didn’t rely entirely on bamboo!

Fossils of the grass roots that support modern pandas are rare in Europe – and, in particular, in late Miocene Bulgaria – the fossil record and the protrusions of its teeth do not appear strong enough to crush logs.

Instead, it likely feeds on softer plant material — in line with the general trend toward increased dependence on plants in this group’s evolutionary history.

Sharing their environment with other large predators likely pushed the giant panda lineage toward vegetarianism.

“Possible competition with other species, particularly carnivores and possibly other bears, explains the giant panda’s closer dietary specialization to a plant-based diet in humid forest conditions,” Professor Spassov said.

The paper speculates that A. nikoloviIts teeth still provide sufficient defense against predators. In addition, their canines were comparable in size to modern pandas, suggesting that they were either the same size or only slightly smaller.

The authors propose that A. nikolovi may have gone extinct as a result of climate change, possibly due to the ‘Messianic salinity crisis’ – an event in which the Mediterranean basin dried up, significantly changing the surrounding terrestrial environment.

“Giant pandas are a very special group of bears,” adds Professor Spassov. “Even if A. niklovi not specialized in habitat and diet like the modern giant panda, the fossil pandas were quite specialized and their evolution was linked to moist forest habitats. It is possible that 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.”

Co-author Qigao Jiangzuo, from Peking University, China, was primarily responsible for helping narrow the identity of this strange animal to belonging to the Ailuropodini – a tribe in the bear family Ursidae.
Although this group of animals is best known by its only living representative, the giant panda, they were once scattered throughout Europe and Asia. Interestingly, the authors propose two potential pathways for the distribution of this group.

One possible evolutionary trajectory is that Ailuropodini headed out of Asia and ended up in A. nikolovi in Europe.
However, Professor Spassov adds caution to this hypothesis, stating that paleontological data indicate that “the oldest members of this bear group were found in Europe”.
This suggests that the group may have evolved in Europe and then on to Asia, where the ancestors of other genera, ailurarctos, developed. These early pandas might later evolve into Ailuropoda—modern giant panda.

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Journal

Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology

Article title

The discovery of the Turolian giant panda in Bulgaria and the early evolution and dispersal of the panda lineage

Article Publication Date

1-August-2022

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