With only teeth to go on, scientists have reportedly identified a giant panda ancestor: A. beatrix. // Illustration courtesy José Antonio Peñas, SINC

Christine Dell’Amore
for National Geographic News
Published May 14, 2012

A prehistoric relative of the giant panda has been discovered in Spain, a new study says—which suggests that the charismatic Chinese bears might have originated in Europe.

The 11-million-year-old species, dubbed Agriarctos beatrix, lived in humid forests in what’s now Spain, according to scientists who recently found the animal’s fossil teeth near the city of Zaragoza.

The teeth give paleontologists a lot of information about a species, according to study leader Juan Abella, a paleobiologist at the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales in Madrid, Spain.

“For example, all bear [teeth] have a series of characters that tell us that they are bears. And the same thing happens with dogs, cats, deer, or other vertebrate groups,” Abella said via email.

After analyzing the fossil teeth, he added, the researchers “concluded that they belong to the bear family, and more precisely to the giant panda’s subfamily.”

And the subfamily resemblance may have been striking—Abella and colleagues speculate that the bear had panda-like patterns, because most existing species in the family also have the characteristic dark and white patches.

New Bear Points to European Panda Origins?

But A. beatrix was not your average bear.

For one thing, the 130-pound (60-kilogram) animal was even smaller the smallest modern-day bear species, the sun bear—so it probably wasn’t exactly the top hunter of prehistoric Europe.

Like current pandas and small bears, the newfound species may have scrambled up trees to escape big predators of the day, such as bear dogs—extinct, doglike carnivores—and saber-toothed, feline-like creatures called Barbourofelidae, the team speculated.

For another thing, A. beatrix is the oldest known species in the subfamily Ailuropodinae, which includes the giant panda.

“Therefore, the origin of this group is not located in China, where the [giant panda] species lives, but in the warm and humid regions of [southwestern] Europe,” Abella said.

But Blaine Schubert, a paleontologist at East Tennessee State University who has studied prehistoric bears, said such a claim “seems fairly speculative.”

The new study “doesn’t say that this is evidence that panda bears may have originated in Europe,” said Schubert, who was not involved in the study.

“Further, even if this new fossil is a relative of modern pandas, it doesn’t mean that pandas originated there. I would not suggest this based on the evidence and I wouldn’t want to make a claim like that without a lot more evidence.”

Giant Panda Ancestors Trekked to China?

If giant panda ancestors did come from Spain, how did they get to China?

Previous research suggests bears generally are “able to disperse quite easily if the environmental conditions were favorable for them,” Abella said. At the time, southwestern Europe was warm and humid—good conditions for starting out, he said.

The bears also likely migrated mostly on land—one potential barrier, an ancient European sea called Parathetys, was already shrinking by A. beatrix’s time, he said.

As for whether A. beatrix itself made it to China, “we don’t really know. But no fossil remains of this species have been found outside Spain.”

Abella next hopes to unearth an A. beatrix skeleton, which would reveal more about the how the bear lived and moved. (See: “Ancient Bear DNA Mapped—A First for Extinct Species.”)

It’s unknown whether such a skeleton exists, but the team working with the Institut Català de Paleontologia in Barcelona to excavate “very rich and interesting” fossil beds, Abella said. These fossil beds could conceivably contain A. beatrix remains, since the beds are about as old as those A. beatrix teeth.

“Until we [find] more remains of this species,” he said, “we can not give much more information.”

By Peter Gwin
Photograph by Brent Stirton
The rifle shot boomed through the darkening forest just as Damien Mander arrived at his campfire after a long day training game ranger recruits in western Zimbabwe’s Nakavango game reserve. His thoughts flew to Basta, a pregnant black rhinoceros, and her two-year-old calf. That afternoon one of his rangers had discovered human footprints following the pair’s tracks as Basta sought cover in deep bush to deliver the newest member of her threatened species.

Damien, a hard-muscled former Australian Special Forces sniper with an imposing menagerie of tattoos, including “Seek & Destroy” in gothic lettering across his chest, swiveled his head, trying to place the direction of the shot. “There, near the eastern boundary,” he pointed into the blackness. “Sounded like a .223,” he said, identifying the position and caliber, a habit left over from 12 tours in Iraq. He and his rangers grabbed shotguns, radios, and medical kits and piled into two Land Cruisers. They roared into the night, hoping to cut off the shooter. The rangers rolled down their windows and listened for a second shot, which would likely signal Basta’s calf was taken as well.

It was an ideal poacher’s setup: half-moon, almost no wind. The human tracks were especially ominous. Poaching crews often pay trackers to find the rhinos, follow them until dusk, then radio their position to a shooter with a high-powered rifle. After the animal is down, the two horns on its snout are hacked off in minutes, and the massive carcass is left to hyenas and vultures. Nearly always the horns are fenced to an Asian buyer; an enterprising crew might also cut out Basta’s fetus and the eyes of the mother and calf to sell to black magic or muti practitioners. If this gang was well organized, a group of heavily armed men would be covering the escape route, ready to ambush the rangers.

As the Land Cruiser bucked over rutted tracks, Damien did a quick calculation—between his vehicles he had two antiquated shotguns with about a dozen shells. Based on the sound of the shot, the poachers held an advantage in firepower. If the rangers did pick up a trail and followed on foot, they would have to contend with lions, leopards, and hyenas out hunting in the dark.

In the backseat of one of the speeding Land Cruisers, Benzene, a Zimbabwean ranger who had spent nearly a year watching over Basta and her calf and knew the pair intimately, loaded three shells into his shotgun, flicked on the safety, and chambered a round. As we bounced into the night, he said, “It is better for the poachers if they meet a lion than if they meet us.”

AND SO GOES A NIGHT on the front lines of southern Africa’s ruthless and murky rhino war, which since 2006 has seen more than a thousand rhinos slaughtered, some 22 poachers gunned down and more than 200 arrested last year in South Africa alone. At the bloody heart of this conflict is the rhino’s horn, a prized ingredient in traditional Asian medicines. Though black market prices vary widely, as of last fall dealers in Vietnam quoted prices ranging from $33 to $133 a gram, which at the top end is double the price of gold and can exceed the price of cocaine.

Although the range of the two African species—the white rhino and its smaller cousin, the black rhino—has been reduced primarily to southern Africa and Kenya, their populations had shown encouraging improvement. In 2007 white rhinos numbered 17,470, while blacks had nearly doubled to 4,230 since the mid ’90s.

For conservationists these numbers represented a triumph. In the 1970s and ’80s, poaching had devastated the two species. Then China banned rhino horn from traditional medicine, and Yemen forbade its use for ceremonial dagger handles. All signs seemed to point to better days. But in 2008 the number of poached rhinos in South Africa shot up to 83, from just 13 in 2007. By 2010 the figure had soared to 333, followed by over 400 last year. Traffic, a wildlife trade monitoring network, found most of the horn trade now leads to Vietnam, a shift that coincided with a swell of rumors that a high-ranking Vietnamese official used rhino horn to cure his cancer.

A killed 16-foot Burmese python in the Everglades was found with an adult deer in its belly this past fall. Photograph from South Florida Water Management District via AP

Christine Dell’Amore
National Geographic News
Published January 30, 2012

From rabbits to deer to even bobcats, invasive Burmese pythons appear to be eating through the Everglades’ supply of mammals, new research shows.

Since the giant constrictors took hold in Florida in 2000, many previously common mammals have plummeted in number—and some, such as cottontail rabbits, may be totally gone from some areas.