22,000-year-old Panda Skull Shows New Family Line

The Cizhutuo fossil, a 22,000-year-old giant panda skull. (Credit: Yingqi Zhang and Yong Xu) When Qiaomei Fu got her hands on a 22,000-year-old panda skull in 2014, she was both surprised and elated. An expert in paleogenomics, Fu had done most of her past work on the DNA of ancient humans, but she has a personal interest in pandas. Now, in 2018, she and her team at the Chinese Academy of Sciences are the first to have sequenced the entire mitochondrial DNA (mtDNA) genome of an ancient giant panda. The work is outlined in Current Biology. The skull was discovered by her colleague Yingqi Zhang and the Beijing Caver team in Cizhutuo Cave in southern China. Cizhutuo Cave is near other cave sites where fossils of ancient humans and extinct apes had previously been found. Mitochondrial DNA is found in mitochondria, the energy-producing bodies in cells, and is passed from ...