Ailurus fulgens play at Shenzhen Safari Park yesterday. Four Ailurus fulgens, also known as red pandas, have been introduced to the park. The red pandas, two males and two females, are aged 3 to 5. Special staff have been assigned to take care of them so that they will adapt to the new environment sooner. Despite being classified as carnivores, both giant pandas and red pandas, which separately evolved from meat-eating ancestors and diverged from each other more than 40 million years ago, subsist almost entirely on bamboo — a phenomenon termed convergent evolution, where similar traits arise in two unrelated or distantly related species.

Li Musheng