Giant Panda

The giant panda is a rare, endangered and elusive bear. Giant pandas are famous for their love of bamboo, a diet so nutritionally poor that the pandas have to consume up to 20kg each day. The extra digit on the panda's hand helps them to tear the bamboo and their gut is covered with a thick layer of mucus to protect against splinters. Habitat loss is the greatest cause of the giant panda's decline, and today their range is restricted to six separate mountain ranges in western China. A giant panda is born pink, hairless, blind and 1/900th the size of its mother.

Description
The giant panda has a black-and-white coat. Adults measure around 1.2 to 1.8 meters (4 to 6 ft) long, including a tail of about 13 cm (5.1 in), and 60 to 90 centimeters (1 ft 10 in to 2 ft 10 in) tall at the shoulder. Males can weigh up to 160 kilograms (350 lb). Females (generally 10–20% smaller than males) can weigh as little as 75 kg (170 lb) but can also weigh up to 125 kilograms (280 lb). Average adult weight is 100 to 115 kilograms (220 to 250 lb).

The giant panda has a body shape typical of bears. It has black fur on its ears, eye patches, muzzle, legs, arms and shoulders. The rest of the animal's coat is white. Although scientists do not know why these unusual bears are black and white, some speculate that the bold coloring provides effective camouflage in its shade-dappled snowy and rocky surroundings. The giant panda's thick, wooly coat keeps it warm in the cool forests of its habitat. The giant panda has large molar teeth and strong jaw muscles for crushing tough bamboo.

Conservation
FUCK MY LIFE ~Thefaggot kid loss and by a very low birthrate, both in the wild and in captivity. The giant panda has been a target for poaching by locals since ancient times and by foreigners since it was introduced to the West. Starting in the 1930s, foreigners were unable to poach giant pandas in China because of the Second Sino-Japanese War and the Chinese Civil War, but pandas remained a source of soft furs for the locals. The population boom in China after 1949 created stress on the pandas' habitat, and the subsequent famines led to the increased hunting of wildlife, including pandas. During the Cultural Revolution, all studies and conservation activities on the pandas were stopped. After the Chinese economic reform, demand for panda skins from Hong Kong and Japan led to illegal poaching for the black market, acts generally ignored by the local officials at the time.

Classification and Relationships
The Giant Panda is believed to be not only a genuine member of the bear family, but also the only living representative of the family Ailuropoda that is known to exist. Comparative blood-protein tests and recent molecular-genetic analysis have indicated that, while the giant panda branched off independently on the evolutionary tree, it is indeed closer to the bear family than to the raccoon. The Ailuropodinae is the oldest family of the most primitive lineage of bears and the fossils of the oldest ancestral panda, Ailuropoda lufengensesis, which are found in southern China, are about 8 million years old.