Red panda - Women's Word Art Crewneck Sweatshirt

Created out of the words Red Panda

All you have to do is look at them and Its easy to see why Red Pandas have exploded in popularity lately. They are even starting to give the Black and White Pandas a run for their money! Red Panda fossils have been discovered in North America that date as far back as 5 million years. Today, however, red pandas are only found in small, isolated mountain territories above 4,000 feet in China, Nepal, India, Bhutan, and Burma. Lucky for us because of how popular they’ve become you can go fall in love with them at many Zoos around the united states. So, the million-dollar question is are they related to the Black and White Panda? Here is the answer we found on the San Diego Zoo Website: Classifying animals is not an easy task, and scientists have argued for years over red pandas and giant pandas: are they related to each other? Red pandas and giant pandas share a common ancestor that lived millions of years ago. Yet because of the giant panda’s larger size, some biologists came to write about red pandas as “lesser” pandas. For many years, red pandas were classified as part of the Procyonidae family, which includes raccoons and their relatives. But DNA studies show that red pandas represent a unique family that diverged from the rest of the Carnivore Order, and scientists place them in their own unique family: Ailuridae.