Ailuropoda

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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 is an ursid genus containing four species of giant pandas[1]. Only one species, the Giant Panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) currently exists; the other three species are prehistoric chronospecies.

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

[edit] Classification

[edit] 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. 
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