Ailuropoda

del.icio.us del.icio.us
Digg Digg
Furl Furl
Reddit Reddit
Rojo Rojo
Add to OnlyWire
Ailuropoda
Fossil range: Late Pliocene to Recent

Scientific classification
Kingdom: Animalia
Phylum: Chordata
Class: Mammalia
Order: Carnivora
Family: Ursidae
Genus: Ailuropoda
Milne-Edwards, 1870
Species

†A. baconi
A. melanoleuca
†A. microta
†A. wulingshanensis
Ailuropoda fovealis skull
Ailuropoda fovealis skull

Ailuropoda is an ursid genus containing five species of giant pandas[1]. Only one species, the Giant Panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) currently exists; the other four species are prehistoric chronospecies. Despite its taxonomic classification as a carnivore, the panda has a diet that is primarily herbivorous, which consists almost exclusively of bamboo.

Pandas are descended from Ailurarctos, which lived during the late Miocene[1].

Classification

References

  1. ^ a b Jin, Changzhu; Russell L. Ciochon, Wei Dong, Robert M. Hunt Jr., Jinyi Liu, Marc Jaeger and Qizhi Zhu (June 19, 2007). "The first skull of the earliest giant panda" (PDF; fee required). Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 104 (26): 10932–10937. doi:10.1073/pnas.0704198104. PMID 17578912. Retrieved on 2007-06-19. 
 This article about a carnivore is a stub. You can help Wikipedia by expanding it.
Retrieved from "http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ailuropoda"

More about Ailuropoda: ailuropoda characteristic genus,

This article is from Wikipedia. All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License.