Stories tagged giant pandas

The limestone caves of south China have recently coughed out the bizarre phrase “pygmy giant panda.”

Unsure of exactly what this could mean, the Chinese government has assembled an international team of linguists and philosophers to deconstruct the unusual message.

A local expert weighs in on the issue: Some segments of the panda population resent the association with "any kind of moron." (photo credit: drs2biz on flickr)

“It’s not as complicated as it might initially sound,” says Canadian linguist, Genny LeCroix. “When we began this project, there was the very real concern that ‘pygmy’ and ‘giant’ would simply cancel each other out, leaving just ‘panda,’ which might have been extremely unstable without any modifiers. That’s not the sort of thing you want hanging around in caves. It’s dangerous and confusing. Fortunately, a few lab tests revealed that we were dealing with a real object – bones, in fact – and not an actual oxymoron”

Ironically, discovery turned out to have much more significance to biology and natural history than linguistics. Two million years old, the bones belong to the skeleton of an animal extremely similar to the modern giant panda, only about half the size.

Wear patterns on the pygmy giant panda’s teeth, and muscle attachment locations on the skull, suggest that the extinct creature was adapted to eating bamboo shoots, just like its giant descendent. The giant panda is the world’s only known wholly vegetarian bear, and the evidence that this specialization extends back at least two million years shows that pandas have been “uniquely pandas” for a very long time.

The Chinese government, fearing a repeat of the “pygmy mammoth” situation on Wrangel Island, was thrilled at the news, and has commissioned an international team of experts to reconstruct what the pygmy giant panda must have looked like in life. Here’s a look at some of their early results:

A window to the past: Experts offer an accurate recreation of these ancient, noble creatures. (photo credit: Xinhua)

Something a little more straightforward.

Tags : animals, pandas, giant pandas, pygmy, pygmy giant panda, linguistics

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Giant Panda Bear: A Giant Panda forages for food.

According to a graduate researcher at the Georgia Institute of Technology, giant pandas can see in color. Two pandas at Zoo Atlanta were tested over a period of two years, in numerous trials, to see if they could distinguish between colors and shades of gray. The bears were presented with three pipes- two pipes hanging over a shade of gray and one pipe hanging over a color, either red, green, or blue. If the bear chose the color, it received a treat. If it pushed a gray- labeled pipe, the bear got nothing. While the results of the tests for each color, red, green, and blue, were varied in their success, the results did prove that giant pandas have some color vision, though the level of vision they have remains in question. Reserachers say that the ability to see color could aid the bears in foraging for food, like being able to tell the difference between a patch of healthy, green bamboo and a patch of brown, dead bamboo.

Tags : Zoo Atlanta, giant pandas, color vision

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