Author: Liao Junqi
Editor: Wan Jun
"Paddington Bear 2" has been released for almost a month, have you ever gone to the cinema to experience the cute charm of the bear? However, about the origin of this cute bear, the film only gives vague clues, today let us use the progress of paleontology to boldly consider and judge the origin of Paddington bear!
What is Paddington's bear?
What kind of bear Paddington Bear is, we are given some clues in the first episode of the movie.
When the museum staff wanted to "exhibit" Paddington bears, the sign read "ursa marmalada", which was written in the same way as the naming conventions of Linnaeus' two-name method. The two-name law stipulates that the scientific name of a creature consists of two parts, preceded by a genus name that begins with a capital letter, followed by all lowercase seed additions, marked in italics, and latinized words.
Ursa in "ursa marmalada" is the Latin root of the bear, while marmalada is Latinized from marmalade and translates to "jam bear". However, the current biology of the bear genus is "ursus", so the discovery of Paddington bears should belong to the new genus and new species, of course, it may just be a movie misspelling. But even if you use "ursus", it is a new species. The fact that large mammals can discover new species is indeed a major discovery, and it is no wonder that museum personnel are so eager for him.
Since it is a new species, this bear may be related to what bear is alive? This brings us to the second clue.
The second clue also comes from the first episode, where it is stated in the film that the bear comes from "mysterious Peru". There is currently only one species of bear in South America called the Spectacled Bear. The spectacled bear is the only surviving short-faced bear that lives mainly in the Andes Andes and has a long and narrow range, with distributions in western Venezuela, Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, western Bolivia and Argentina.
A spectacled bear at the Tennoji Zoo in Japan. Image credit: Kuribo| Wikipedia
The ancestors of the spectacled bear were found in North America, including the Florida spectacled bear and the giant short-faced bear, which are now extinct and only exist in South America. Their diet has also ranged from the early meat diet to the current herbivorous diet, and their daily diet includes cacti, pineapple plants and some fruits. So, geographically, paddington bears may be an evolutionary branch of the spectacled bear.
However, the spectacled bear is not a ursus, but a genus of tremarctos in the family Ursidae. So, going back to the possibility that "ursa" is misspelled for "ursus," Paddington bears are not spectacled bears, but may be members of some genus of bears that migrated to South America without being discovered.
It may be a little confusing to hear this, so what bears are there today, and how are they classified? Let's take a quick look.
Today, there are 8 species of bears in the world, divided into three genera.
The first genus is the panda genus that everyone is familiar with and distributed in Asia. There is only one species in this genus, namely the giant panda that is full of cuteness and is popular all over the world.
"Are you talking about me?" Image source: ipanda.com
By the way, the giant panda is obviously a "bear", why is it called a "cat"? There is a rumor that when the giant panda specimen was exhibited at the Chongqing Exposition in the 1940s, its Chinese name conformed to the Latin inscription at the bottom, and the word "cat bear" was written from left to right, but the Chinese at that time were still accustomed to reading from right to left, and they became "panda" or "giant panda" by false rumors.
The second genus is the genus Spectacle Bear that we introduced earlier, and there is only one species under it, namely the Spectacled Bear distributed in South America.
The third genus consists of six species, including the largest polar bear and the smallest Malay bear in the entire bear family, as well as brown bears, American black bears, Asian black bears, and sloth bears. The morphological characteristics of sloth bears and Malay bears are quite different from the other four, so the early two were divided into sloth bears and Malay bears, but based on further genomic and chromosome studies, these two bears are not far related to the other four species, so today's classification is generally classified into the bear genus.
Sloth Bear (left) and Malay Bear (right). Image credit: postdlf and tambako the jaguar
How is the bear calendar calculated?
At the beginning of Paddington Bear 2, it is mentioned that "after a few years of the bear calendar" (bears may not be very good at counting, so the number of years is not explicitly written). If bears do have a "bear calendar", when should they start counting?
Bear Calendar...? (Actually, the English version of the species calendar) Image source: Fruit Shell Shop
Because there are still bears today, plus some extinct bears are not too far away, dna has not been completely degraded, so in the study of bears in paleontology, in addition to using traditional morphological and fossil evidence, it will also refer to dna sequences for comparison, and use "molecular clocks" to infer the time node of evolution. The fossil evidence of bears and the results of molecular clocks can be well matched with each other, and the left evidence can be used to calculate the starting time of the "bear calendar" by these methods.
The first "bear calendar" algorithm may be traced back to the "origin of bears". The earliest bears may have originated from the Late Eocene to the Early Oligocene 30 million to 40 million years ago, and according to fossil evidence, the earliest bears may have originated in Europe and then fled from Europe to the Americas and Asia. Although there were once some bears in Africa, there seems to be a curse on bears, and except for a few fossils found in some areas, the traceability of bears has never been much success in Africa. The brown bears that last existed in North Africa were also completely extinct in 1870 due to large-scale human hunting. At this point, the bear has withdrawn from the African continent in its entirety.
The second algorithm can be calculated from the "origin of the jam bear". As mentioned earlier, "jam bears" may be closely related to the "spectacled bears" in South America, so perhaps the origin of the genus "spectacled bears" can be used as a criterion. Of the three bear genera that are emerging, the first to differentiate is the Asian panda genus, which appeared about 15 million years ago, the spectacled bear genus we care about appeared about 7 to 8 million years ago, and the widely distributed bear genus appeared about 4.5 million years ago.
Some friends who are familiar with the condition of the fossil may find this year strange. For example, the first panda in Asia, the first panda fossil, lived about 8 million years ago, and if you count the suburban pandas in Europe, it is about 10 million years, far less than 15 million years. But it should be known that it takes a certain amount of time for a species to form and reach a certain number of populations so that fossils can be retained, so it will use fossil evidence plus molecular clock calculations to derive the possible time for earlier differentiation.
But then again, our current human calendar is not calculated by the appearance of ancient apes in Africa, nor by the origin of modern Homo sapiens" of Homo sapiens, but after human civilization has developed, it has begun to have calendars according to the rules and needs of various cultures. Therefore, the so-called "bear calendar" may be calculated using a third algorithm, that is, from the time when the jam bear developed civilization. And the jam bear loves jam so much that it can be counted about the year of learning jam, that is, the period of encounter with British explorers.
Bears and dogs
Paddington Bear 2 also has a loyal stray dog friend. In fact, the relationship between dogs and bears is not only as simple as friends, they are even related by blood, and have a common ancestor tens of thousands of years ago.
According to Linnaeus' systematic classification, the taxonomy can be divided into boundaries, phylums, orders, families, genera, and species from top to bottom, and as the classification becomes more and more detailed, subspecies, superfamilys, and so on will be added.
Like the mammalian subclass we belong to, there are many orders below, such as proboscis (elephants, etc.), pterodactyls (bats, etc.), even-hoofed orders (cattle, sheep, etc.), odd-hoofed orders (rhinoceros, horses, etc.), cetaceans, primates, rabbits, rodents, etc.; such as echidnas, platypus, etc. are derived from the protozoopod subclass; and kangaroos, koalas and other marsupials are the same as the theost subclass, but we belong to the suborder of true beasts, and the marsupials belong to the subclass posterior theost.
I believe that everyone has begun to confuse here, from the order to the order, there are actually subclasses and sub-subclasses and so on. This is due to the fact that as the classification system becomes more clear, the previous taxa is often no longer sufficient and can only be continuously added up or down on many taxonomies.
However, some recent methods have suggested that "species" are the only taxonomies that really exist in nature, and that the taxonos above are artificial and exist only for the convenience of classification. Therefore, it is advocated to abolish the taxonomy above the level of "species" and to change all of them to "classes". For example, mammals have protozoa and mammals, while mammals contain true mammals and marsupials. For the sake of convenience, the following species are replaced by "classes" instead of various classes, suborders, suborders, orders, suborders, general families, families, and so on.
Back to the main theme, dogs, bears, and some carnivores are all classified as carnivores. Under the carnivorous meat, it is mainly divided into two categories, namely the "canine-shaped class" of the dog school and the "cat-shaped class" of the cat school. "Cat-shaped" are like lions, tigers, domestic cats, and so on. Dogs, bears, etc. all belong to the "canine-shaped class", and the kinship is closer than that of cat-shaped, originating in the Speneene about 40 million years ago. However, although the kinship is close, in the canine class, the dog and bear are not closely related.
Among the "canines", there are also pinnipeds and ferrets. Pinnipeds contain some aquatic mammals such as sea lions, fur seals, seals, etc., while ferrets, in addition to ferrets, also contain well-known raccoons and red pandas. These two groups are more closely related to bears. Dogs diverged about 40 million years ago, and these three diverged about 30 million years ago and embarked on different evolutionary paths.
Thanks
In particular, this article is grateful to Jiang Zuoqigao, a doctoral student at the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, for his detailed and cutting-edge introduction and assistance in the classification and evolution of bears.
Typography: Xiaolan
Title image source: Douban
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