UnNews:Pandas being bamboozled into extinction
| Where man always bites dog | ✪ | UnNews | ✪ | Thursday, November 21, 2024, 15:29:59 (UTC) |
| Pandas being bamboozled into extinction | 
|
28 August 2015
BEIJING, China -- Famed for its voracious diet of bamboo and fighting evil snow leopards, the precious giant panda now carries the title of another one of Mother Nature's little birth defects.
According to new research by Chinese scientists, this humble tree-munching bear is actually meant to be a meat-eater. About 7 million years ago, their mighty ancestors ravaged prehistoric campsites and disembowelled cavemen before stealing their picnic baskets. At some point in time, the once-great carnivores switched to bamboo. While the reason is unclear, experts believe that the dinosaurs wiped out their food source - consisting of neanderthals and sabre-toothed gazelle - prompting the pandas to make the switch to a healthier vegan diet. However, since vegetables weren't invented at the time, the only thing available to them was bamboo.
Not only are these cuddly beasts causing their carnivorous ancestors to turn over in their graves, but it seems evolution has ditched them. The guts of a panda bear contain traits akin to most meat-eating creatures. Unfortunately, while its relatives like the polar, grizzly and teddy bear are happily slaughtering other creatures for food, the panda refuses to live up to its meat-eating potential because the competition is fierce.
"It eats what it's not supposed to," says a local hipster, "because — irony." Taking this into account, as well as the species' poor breeding habits, inability to cope with change, and depiction in the media as fat karate-chopping heroes, one may wonder why the panda race was able to survive for so long on nothing but bamboo. Experts say it is high levels of adorbs worthy of being spared Nature's horrible wrath. The dinosaurs were not so lucky.
Sources[edit]
- Karen Kaplan "How pandas may be eating their way to extinction". LA Times, May 19, 2015
- Mother Nature "Panda guts not suited to bamboo". BBC Earth, May 19, 2015