Red panda

The red panda is a small, reddish-brown mammal of the eastern Himalayas and south-western China. It was the first animal to be called a panda: it was described by Western scientists in the 1820s, and the name “panda” was used for it for decades before the much larger black-and-white giant panda was described in 1869 and borrowed the name.^[1] The red panda has been politely waiting ever since for the name to be returned.

Relations

Despite the name and their shared love of bamboo, red pandas are not closely related to giant pandas. The red panda is in a family of its own. Both animals, however, have an enlarged wrist bone that works like a thumb, helping them grip bamboo stems.^[2] Biologists describe this as two different animals arriving at the same solution, and the bamboo describes it as unfortunate.

The red panda is not really red either. It is a sort of rusty orange, but “rusty-orange panda” was felt to be a bit much.

Diet

Bamboo makes up most of the red panda's diet, though it also eats fruit, acorns, eggs and insects. Bamboo is not very nutritious, so red pandas spend a large part of the day eating and much of the rest asleep, curled up in trees with their long, ringed tails wrapped over their faces like a scarf.

See also

• Red – roughly its colour
• Orange – more accurately its colour
• Koala – another tree-dwelling vegetarian with a misleading name

References

1. Firstname, F. (1825). Panda (the Original). Fictional reprint.
2. Thumb, W. (2006). “A Wrist Bone, Used as a Thumb”. Mammal Hands 2: 1.
3. Rust, R. (2014). Not Really Red. Mountain Press.