Just when you thought nothing could be more adorable than a cuddly black and white panda, it turns out that there are brown pandas too.
Spotted only in the Qinling Mountains in China, they are part of a subspecies of giant panda that have smaller skulls and larger molar teeth. The fuzzy brown and white bears are so rare that only seven have ever been seen in the last 30 years.
Currently, there’s only one known living brown panda in the world. Researchers discovered him when he was just two months old after he had been abandoned by his mother in a nature reserve. The extremely rare animal, named Qizai, now lives in the Foping Panda Valley in China’s Shaanxi province, where it has become somewhat of a celebrity.
Scientists have come up with two theories that may explain the odd coloring.
The first is that it could be the manifestation of a double recessive gene, meaning it inherited a recessive gene for brown fur from both of its parents. If that’s the case, it could suggest that the animals in the isolated Qinling populations are inbreeding.
The other theory is that the brown adaptation may have been caused by the pandas’ environment. Qinling pandas are black and white for the most part, but many of them have patches of brown on their chest. That could mean something in the location, such as the climate, soil or water, affected the pandas’ pigmentation.
Until more research can be done, no one knows just why brown pandas look the way they do. But we can probably all agree that they are cute!
