Misconceptions Removed To the Editor of the "Nonti-Cumva Dany News"
Sin—t have read with great interest the account by F.L.T. in your valuable newspaper of the adult live female giant panda which Mr. Floyd Tangier "Ajax" Smith is taking to London in the Andre Lebon, thi being only the second living specimen of this remarkable herbivorous carnivore to leave the shores of China, There appear to be some points in this account which need clearing up. One of these is that the giant panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca, David) and its cousins the little pandas (Ailurus fulgeris of Nepal and Ailurus fulgens styan Thomas of West China) are definitely distinct from the bears. Science entertains no doubts on the matter. These three animals have been placed in a group, by themsel forming a connecting Wink between the bear family (Ursidae) and the
stomach and entire viscera of the giant panda have been examined in racoon family ens The detail in New York at the American Museum of Natural History, and have been compared with those of the bear and other animals by Mr. H. C. Raven, who had these parts, carefully preserved, from an adult specimen shot on the Dean Sage West China Expedition in 1934. Mr. Raven's report.appeared in the "American Museum Novitates," No. 877, August 8,1936. In the same journal a detailed comparison of the skulls of the giant panda and little panda with those of various species of bears, dogs and the: racoon, coming to the conclusion that the pandas are more clósely related to the racoons than they are to the bears or members of the dog (ie. wolf) family (Canidae). He even places them in the same family (Procyonidae) as the racoons, but gives them sub-family rank Ailurince, Most mammalogists, however, will agree that the pandas should constitute a distinct family, Ailuridae.
As regards the matter of how the giant panda came to occupy its present habitat of dense bamboo jungle, Mr. Smith la going a long way without any factual foundation when he suggests that long ago its. ancestors "vere driven to seek shelter in the bamboo jungles owing to their inability to defend themselves against such fierce animals as leopards which abound in the mountains of West China. In the first place the giant panda had acquired its present characteristics at least 100,000 years, pos-Sibly as much as half a million years, ago, "that isto say, in the early Pleistocene period, as its fossil remains, closely similar to the present-day form, have been discovered in Lower Pleistocene deposits near Wanhsien in Western Szechuan by Dr.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.