Since when do pandas eat bamboo? Researchers have an answer.

Pandas have been consuming bamboo for six million years, according to a recent study by the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles.

Researchers discovered that the bear’s forebears also possessed a’sixth digit’ that resembled a thumb to hold their preferred food after analysing a new fossil.

According to the study, this characteristic was also present in the late Miocene epoch in the ancestor panda genus Ailurarctos.

The earliest evidence of the appendage is substantially older than the 100,000–150,000 years that prior study estimated the earliest evidence of the thumb-like feature to have existed.

‘Deep in the bamboo forest, giant pandas traded an omnivorous diet of meat and berries to quietly consuming bamboos, a plant plentiful in the subtropical forest but of low nutrient value,” said palaeontologist Professor Xiaoming Wang, who examined the wrist bone of an individual from the ancestral panda genus Ailurarctos.

‘Tightly holding bamboo stems in order to crush them into bite sizes is perhaps the most crucial adaptation to consuming a prodigious quantity of bamboo,’ he added.

Pandas must consume between 26 and 84 pounds of it daily to survive. They are found mostly in temperate forests high in the mountains of southwest China.

A baby panda is roughly the size of a stick of butter, but as adults, females can reach weights of up to 200 pounds and males can reach weights of up to 300 pounds, according to the World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF).