According to TASS, Chinese and Bulgarian paleontologists recently published an article in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology announcing that they have found the remains of an ancient giant panda of a new species that lived in Eastern Europe about 7 to 5 million years ago in western Bulgaria, and scientists have concluded after studying that it is the last giant panda in the region.
European scientists named the ancient panda Agrirctos nikolovi in honor of Ivan Nikolov, the scientist who discovered the remains of these bears. Nikolai Spassov, a professor at the National Museum of Natural History of Sofia (Bulgaria), said: "Pandas are a special group of bears, and the Agliarctos nikolovi we found may be inferior in some respects to modern giant pandas, but they have also adapted to life in warm and humid forests." Climate change has had a negative impact on the life of Europe's last giant panda. ”
Researchers believe that due to climate change at the end of the Miocene, the European ancient panda disappeared from 23 million to 5.3 million years ago. The extinction may have been triggered by the "Messinian salinity crisis," when the Mediterranean Sea dried up almost completely.
But European scientists still don't have a firm account of the relationship between extinct European giant pandas and ancient Asian pandas and modern pandas, and the question of why pandas switched from eating meat to eating bamboo also plagued scientists.