Panda Ming
In 1958, London welcomed the panda Qiqi, the prototype panda on the emblem of the World Wildlife Fund and one of the most popular animals in the history of London Zoo.
On February 4, 2010, due to the lack of food in the mountains in winter, a wild giant panda came to the home of Li Tingzhong, a villager in Dongsheng Village, Wulong Township, Baoxing County, to "be a guest", and Li Tingzhong warmly took out ribs and other hospitality. In the winter of the following years, this giant panda will come to the "guest" to fight the tooth festival. Photo by Gao Huakang
On July 23, 1984, a sick giant panda was found in The Bee Barrel Zhai Township of Baoxing County. The staff of the reserve and local villagers waded across the rapidly flowing Baoxing River to rescue the giant pandas back to the reserve. Photo by Gao Huakang
On December 27, 2018, the giant panda "Little Walnut" was released back to nature, which was also the first time that the giant panda was released to the giant panda in Chengdu. Photo by He Haiyang
According to the results of the fourth national giant panda survey, by the end of 2013, a total of 1864 wild giant pandas had been found nationwide, and more than 70% of them were distributed in Sichuan.
On April 1, 150 years ago, the French naturalist Armand David made a historic discovery in the jungle of Dengchigou in Baoxing County, Ya'an City: a complete record of a living giant panda was recorded and its specimen was sent to France, which was later identified as a new animal species by the director of the Natural History Museum in Paris. Since then, giant pandas have entered the field of human scientific research and gained the favor of people around the world.
On the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the scientific discovery of giant pandas, cover news reporters came to Ya'an, the "hometown" of giant pandas, to explore the journey of giant pandas from the mountains to the world for a century and a half.
1
Encounter Discover the first "black and white bear"
On February 22, 1869, the French missionary Father Armand David left Chengdu for Qionglai to visit Dengchigou Cathedral. On the 1,765-meter-high mountainside platform of Dengchigou in Muping (now Baoxing County) stands a church built in 1839, belonging to the Chengdu Ping'an Bishopric of the Far East Diocese of Paris, which is the base camp of the Catholic Church in western Sichuan.
On this trip to the church, David gained even more—he found himself in a treasure trove of nature. On March 11, on his way home from an expedition to the top of the Red Mountain, he rested at the home of a mountain man surnamed Li. On the wall by the fire pond hung a black and white fur, which attracted his great interest from the local animal known as the "flower bear" under the introduction of the owner.
After about 20 days of hiring local hunters, David finally collected black and white bear specimens. This is an adult giant panda, with black and white coats, hairy bottoms on the soles of its feet, and looks like a bear, which is a strange animal he has never seen before.
Its specimens and skeletons were shipped to France, and Miller Edwards concluded based on the panda's fur and skeleton and David's report: this is a rare new species of animal in the world, initially named "black and white bear".
2
Evolution from big cat bear to giant panda
Later, given that the bamboo-eating Lesser Panda had been discovered in the foothills of the Himalayas in 1821, zoologists named it Giant Panda.
So from the big cat bear to the giant panda, what has been experienced in this process? An interesting legend is that since before the 1950s, the way Chinese was written was straight books, recognition was from right to left, and after changing to horizontal books, it was from left to right, when the Sichuan Beibei Museum exhibited in 1939, the title was horizontal book, named Cat Bear, and at that time, visitors were accustomed to reading straight books from right to left, mistakenly thinking of pandas. The name of the giant panda came from this and is still used today. A newspaper in Taiwan once wrote an article to justify the name of "panda", but everyone has become accustomed to it, but feels that "cat bear" is not so smooth.
Time back, in fact, the giant panda has appeared countless times in the ancient Chinese classics. From tapir to cat, as well as many names such as white leopard and iron-eating beast, it is considered to be the "former name" of the giant panda.
So since Chinese have already discovered the giant panda, why give David the honor of discovering the giant panda?
"David's discovery is a discovery in the modern scientific sense, and its scientific name is named according to the requirements of animal taxonomy, which follows internationally recognized standards." Tan Kai, a well-known giant panda culture expert, introduced that David has discovered 189 new species in China for 12 years. These include giant pandas, golden snub-nosed monkeys, antelopes, elk, tung (pigeon flowers), large-leaved rhododendrons, primroses and so on. He also left the world with the precious "Dave Flora", which was once the "action guide" for Western explorers to find new plant species according to Tu Suoji. There is also "Birds of China", which records many species that have disappeared in China today, and the three volumes of "Chinese Animals".
3
"Historiography" can be deduced to 8 million years ago
Giant pandas have been found, but where did this animal come from?
In 1956, the fossil of the "small species panda" was discovered in Guangxi. Excavations began in 1957 and ended in 1964. According to the annual calculation, thousands of vertebrate fossils were found, the intact mandible of the world's first small species of panda was obtained, and a total of 79 fossils of small pandas were unearthed.
More than 10 years later, in the 1970s, coal miners in the Lufeng Basin of Yunnan Province discovered a large number of vertebrate fossils while working in a lignite coal mine in Lime dam Village, 9 kilometers from the county seat of Lufeng County. After learning about it, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences sent personnel to investigate in 1978. With the assistance of coal miners, the expeditions saw animal fossils in the coal seam. Not only that, but they also collected fossils of ancient apes from coal seams.
Because of the significance of this discovery, the Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology of the Chinese Academy of Sciences has carried out many years of excavations at the fossil site since 1978, and obtained a large number of vertebrate fossils, especially worth mentioning the discovery of ancient ape skulls, mandibles, limb bones and some rare mammal fossils, including Lu Fengshi panda.
The discovery of the first panda is a major event in the "history" of pandas. It pushes the evolutionary history of giant pandas forward nearly 1 million years to the Late Miocene period and argues that pandas originated in China. At this point, the "origin" of giant pandas determined by humans can be deduced to 8 million years ago.
But controversy has arisen in recent years. In 2017, French scientists published an article in the journal Earth Biology that fossilized 10 million-year-old giant panda teeth were found in Hungary, "thus supporting the European origin of giant pandas."