Huh I legit thought they were a more recent species, like last glacial maximum. Is this one of those things like with the three toe sloth and two toe sloth where they are on opposite sides of their evolutionary tree but look generally similar? Are pandas kinda like sun bears where they are more or less doing their own thing while black, brown, and polar bears stay grouped weirdly close to each other in behavior.
Google tells me that pandas started eating bamboo 6-8 million years ago and stopped eating meat 3 million years ago.
That’s not exactly recent.
For reference, the first Homo appeared 2.8 million years ago and the first Homo Sapiens 300 000 years ago.
The last common ancestor of humans and chimpanzees lived 5-10 million years ago.
So if evolution can evolve humans in that time frame, you’d expect that it could also adapt an omnivour to a herbivour.
Huh I legit thought they were a more recent species, like last glacial maximum. Is this one of those things like with the three toe sloth and two toe sloth where they are on opposite sides of their evolutionary tree but look generally similar? Are pandas kinda like sun bears where they are more or less doing their own thing while black, brown, and polar bears stay grouped weirdly close to each other in behavior.