Human Age to Panda Years Calculator

Pandas are animals from the bear family. Their food is completely made of bamboo. The thumb-like wrist bone that developed in pandas is called the Radial Sesamoid. This new knuckle which acts as the thumb is also called False Thumb. Because of this, the food of pandas became completely based on bamboo, while they are carnivorous animals of the bear family.

In a new study published in Scientific Reports, Xiaoming Wang, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, and his colleagues have told about the discovery on the panda in their report. According to him, the ancestors of the ancient Bamboo Eating Panda had such a false thumb, which was surprisingly much larger than that of the modern descendants.

The thumb did not develop in the modern panda. A knuckle developed from the bone of their wrist, which they uses as a false thumb and breaks the bamboo and uses it to give it an edible shape. Paleontologists have found from fossils that are 6–7 million years old, that ancient pandas also had such bone knuckles, which they used to make bamboo edible.

It can go in the opposite direction of the fingers making it easier to grasp objects. The case with Panda is a bit different. When pandas hold bamboo, they take support of the enlarged wrist bone. Even in panda, the thumb on the opposite side did not develop properly. The new study has found that this false thumb evolved 6-7 million years ago and was much larger in size than today.

This False Thumb of today's Giant Pandas ie Aleuropoda melanoleusa has been known for more than 100 years. But due to the lack of fossil records, the development of this wrist bone was not properly known. Recently, paleontologists found this knuckle of the ancient giant panda Elurarchotos at the Shiuitangba site of Zhaotong city of Yunnan province of South China. This provided evidence that the ancient panda had a dose of bamboo. This will help in understanding the evolution of this particular structure in a better way.

Wang reported that in the deep forests, Giant Pandas gradually replaced their diet of meat and plums with bamboo, which were found in abundance in subtropical forests. Perhaps the most important adaptation was to grasp bamboo twigs tightly enough to break them to make them edible, allowing them to be eaten in large quantities. This discovery may solve the mystery of why the panda's false thumb was so poorly developed.

Elurarkotos, the ancestor of Giant Panda, was expected to have developed this False Thumb less well. But this knuckle of the fossil discovered by Wang and his colleagues was somewhat long and straight, while this knuckle of modern descendants is short and bent. But pandas use their hands to walk along with eating food, due to which that thumb could not develop.

Wang and his colleagues think that this small false thumb of the modern panda is a compromise for a kind of evolution that requires its help to walk as well as eat bamboo. 6 million years is a long time for a thumb to be long. But due to the weight on the thumb during walking, such development was hindered. In such a situation, developing such a thumb from the wrist bone is a great achievement.

Human to Panda years calculator: How old am I in panda years? A human's 1 year is equal to about 0.34 to 0.41 years of a panda's lifespan. We've created an easy-to-understand chart that shows your age by converting it to a panda's age.