Summary: <p>This week we’re going to learn about bears, including a bunch of m y s t e r y b e a r s!</p> <p>Hi! I am a panda bear!</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-386" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/panda-300x200.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="200"></p> <p>A polar bear:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-full wp-image-387" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/polarbear.jpg" alt="" width="259" height="194"></p> <p>A spectacled bear:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-389" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/animals_hero_spectacledbear-300x169.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="169"></p> <p>A baby spectacled bear OMG LOOK AT THAT BABY:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-388" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/specbearbaby-300x150.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="150"></p> <p>The giant short-faced bear was indeed giant:</p> <p><img class="alignnone size-medium wp-image-390" src="http://strangeanimalspodcast.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/11/Short-faced-Bear-3-300x225.jpg" alt="" width="300" height="225"></p> <p><strong>Further reading:</strong></p> <p><a href="http://karlshuker.blogspot.com/2011/01/stellers-sea-bear-polar-bear-in-japan.html">Shuker Nature</a></p> <p><strong>Show transcript:</strong></p> <p>Welcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I’m your host, Kate Shaw.</p> <p>I’m in the mood for a bona fide mystery animal, and I bet you are too. So this week let’s learn about some mystery bears.</p> <p>There are eight species of bears alive today that we know of: brown, polar, spectacled, sloth, sun, Asian and American black bears, and the giant panda. The other ones you may have heard of, like grizzlies, are subspecies of those eight. For a long time pandas were not considered bears at all, but more closely related to raccoons. These days they’re definitely in the bear box, but they’ve evolved in a completely different direction from other bears for some 19 million years, which is why they’re so different.</p> <p>Before we get into the mysteries, let’s talk about just how different pandas are from other bears. As you probably know, the panda eats bamboo almost exclusively, unlike all other bears which are either omnivorous or, in the case of the polar bear, carnivorous. To survive on bamboo, the panda has evolved a lot of unusual adaptations. The front paws, for instance, have five toes just like all bears, and also a thumb. The thumb is actually a modified wrist bone that juts out from the base of the paw and helps the panda hold bamboo stalks as it eats the leaves.</p> <p>Bamboo is not</p>
