DNA from a 22,000 - year - old fossilized panda skull indicate an altogether separate lineage of elephantine pandas once ramble the area that is now southern China .
A cave explorer find the skull in Guangxi , a Chinese province that borders Vietnam . No giant pandas live there today — the jumbo giant panda universe , which numbers fewer than 2,500 , is confined to three provinces in central China . Research suggests the bears occupied large swath of China in the past , but without DNA analysis , researchers have n’t been able to map out the intact elephantine panda kinsfolk tree . This new oeuvre suggest some antecedently unsung branches .
“ Giant pandas are one of eight bear metal money that survive today , and they ’re really distinct from other bears,”Charlotte Lindqvisttold Gizmodo . Lindqvist is an evolutionary biologist who specify in bear genomics , but was n’t postulate in this new research . “ It ’s interesting to get to have sex more about their ancient distribution and where they are in the history of bears . ”
After sequencing DNA that was lodged in the skull and compare it to the genomes of modern - day giant pandas and 32 other ancient bears , the investigator found this bear from Guangxi shared a common ancestor with today ’s giant pandas around 183,000 eld ago . As the team outline in theirpaperpublished today in Current Biology , this likely makes the newly name bear more of a parallel origin rather than harbinger to the jumbo lesser panda living in China now . And though the researcher could n’t approximate what the bear would have looked like , they eff it was a plant - feeder by psychoanalyze C and atomic number 7 isotope present in the fossil .
In their analytic thinking , the researchers were able-bodied to pull genetic selective information from the fossil by place the mitochondrial DNA ( mtDNA ) instead of the nuclear DNA . mtDNA is easier to catch because there are usually around 1,000 copy of it in a given cell ; for atomic DNA , just a twain live .
However , mtDNA only tells one-half of the genetic story . Because it ’s lapse down maternally , it only move over perceptivity into one side of the lineage . atomic DNA is much more informative because it contain information from both the female parent ’s and father ’s side .
But extracting that nuclear DNA from an ancient fossil can be difficult because much of the DNA degrades over time , particularly in hot , humid locales like this one — it was hard enough to get the mitochondrial DNA , read study author Qiaomei Fu .
“ It ’s a big obligation to get genome - wide data , ” Fu , a paleogeneticist at the Chinese Academy of Sciences , told Gizmodo . “ We can get an understanding not only related to the present day giant lesser panda , but also get out what fall out to them in the past . ”
Getting that nuclear genome of the southern colossus pandas is Fu ’s next goal , whether it be from this Guangxi skull or from another fossil in the same field and time period . That datum would help investigator get a more perfect picture of where this lineage sits in the evolutionary branch of the giant red panda . “ We ’ll try this fossil along with others , ” she say , noting that a like exploit has already been achieve with Neanderthal DNA . First , researchers isolated the mitochondrial DNA , and later , the nuclear . “ We wo n’t give up . ”
[ Current Biology ]
BiologyChinaEvolutionGeneticsScience
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