{"id":728407,"date":"2022-06-30T11:00:10","date_gmt":"2022-06-30T15:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=728407"},"modified":"2022-06-30T11:00:10","modified_gmt":"2022-06-30T15:00:10","slug":"pandas-gave-bamboo-the-thumbs-up-at-least-six-million-years-ago","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/?p=728407","title":{"rendered":"Pandas gave bamboo the thumbs up at least six million years ago"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>When is a thumb not a thumb? When it&#8217;s an elongated wrist bone of the giant panda used to grasp bamboo. Through its long evolutionary history, the panda&#8217;s hand has never developed a truly opposable thumb and instead evolved a thumb-like digit from a wrist bone, the radial sesamoid. This unique adaptation helps these bears subsist entirely on bamboo despite being bears (members of the order Carnivora, or meat-eaters). In a new paper published in Scientific Reports, the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County&#8217;s Curator of Vertebrate Paleontology Xiaoming Wang and colleagues report on the discovery of the earliest bamboo-eating ancestral panda to have this &#8220;thumb.&#8221; Surprisingly, it&#8217;s longer than its modern descendants.&#013;<br \/>\n&#013;<br \/>\n&#013;<br \/>\n Click here for original story, <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/news\/2022-06-pandas-gave-bamboo-thumbs-million.html\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\">Pandas gave bamboo the thumbs up at least six million years ago<\/a>&#013;<br \/>\n&#013;<br \/>\n&#013;<br \/>\nSource: Phys.org&#013;<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>When is a thumb not a thumb? When it&#8217;s an elongated wrist bone of the giant panda used to grasp bamboo. Through its long evolutionary history, the panda&#8217;s hand has&hellip; <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":615444,"comment_status":"false","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[41],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-728407","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-phys-org"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728407","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=728407"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/728407\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/615444"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=728407"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=728407"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/spaceweekly.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=728407"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}