A few days ago news reached Shanghai from Chungking on the Upper Yangtze to the effect that a Douglas air-liner was being specially chartered to carry a cargo of the animals and birds from the river port to Hongkong on their way to the Zoological Gardens in London. Amongst them, the report said, were five adult giant pandas, secured in the highlands of the Chinese-Tibetan border region of Western Szechuen. Everybody now knows about these strange animals, owing to the world-wide publicity given Mrs. Ruth Harkness' remarkable achievement in herself securing a live baby giant panda in those inhospitable and almost inaccessible mountain fastnesses and taking it with her to the United Sates, where it was purchased by the Brookfield Zoo in Chicago for G$8,700, and promptly became the pet of the great American public But few people, even amongst scientists, know that the pandas as a group originated in North America. This is the finding of American anatomists and palaeontologists, who have made a study of the skull and other bones of the giant and little pandas in relation to various other carnivores, living and fossil, the latter from geological strata in countries as far apart as England and Chili in South America. According to them the giant panda, in spite of its close external resemblance to the bears, is more nearly related to the racoon of North America, the coati of South America, and the kinkajou of tropical America. Not only so, but it is also closer to the present day dogs and wolves than it is to the bears. The common ancestor of all these animals was the Miacis, which lived on this earth in the Upper Eocene period, some thirty to forty million years ago. Miacis was a small carnivore not unlike our present day civets, and from it evolved the ancestors of the various groups of carnivores found on the earth today. These included a large dog-like animal called Hemicyon, which was the ances-for of all the bears, and a small dog-like animal, Cyncdictis, which gave rise, on the one hand, to the ancestors of present day dogs, wolves, foxes and the like, and, on the other, io what may be called the ancestral racoon, small animal which has been called Phlaocycn and which was located in North America. In due course Phlaocyom gave rise to the present day racoon, the coati, the Kinkajou and the giant and little pandas. That was some fifteen to twenty million years ago. The line of its descendants which produced the pandas must have spread to Asia by way of the land bridge, which, in the Miocene period, existed between the two continents in the region of what is now the Behring Sea. These spread westward as far as England, before the whole group became extinct in Asia and Europe, with the exception of the two forms of panda we now know, which found a last refuge in a com paratively small area of high mountainous country occupying West and South-West China, East Tibet and the Eastern Himalaya. Here the giant panda evolved, externally along the same lines as the bears, and internally (that is, in its teeth, skull, larynx and digestive organs) to cope with the extraordinary diet, for a carnie vote or fosh-eater, of bamboo, a plant whic grows in abundance in the mountainous region it inhabits. Thus, as one writer has remarked, the giant pandas recently taken to the United States have merely returned to the home of their ancestors, after a sojourn in Asia of some ten to fifteen million years.—A. DE C. S.
Text read from the printed page and cleaned; old type leaves the occasional error.