“Q: so i work at a museum, and i recently was confronted by a (very angry) creationist who challenged me to explain how pandas could have evolved since they have ‘teeth and guts like a carnivore’? i don’t study pandas (or anything near that- i work w marine reptiles), so could you explain how or why pandas have these features- sharp teeth and a ‘carnivore’s gut’, so I’m not so caught off guard next time? or at least point me somewhere i can learn this? documentaries don’t really go that in depth.”

— Anonymous

I’ve been staring at this ask for a few days because I’m genuinely struggling to comprehend how somebody could come to you with the fact that the bamboo-eating panda has a carnivore’s gut and dentition… and this supposedly proves creationism and not the opposite???

If you’ve got an animal that seems to have traits that are unsuited to what it does, but are the same traits as those of its earlier relatives, who do different things very well - then congratulations!!! You’re seeing evolution.

Working our way outwards, phylogenetically, pandas are within the Ursidae family (bears), in the suborder Caniformia (canines) in the order Carnivora (basically all the placental “predators”). To cut a long story much, much too short, this means bears are more closely related to canines & co. (seals, weasels, raccoons, etc) than they are to cats & co. (hyenas, viverrids, etc), but they’re more closely related to ALL cats & dogs & co. than they are to any other mammal. Clear as mud? Super.

The first carnivorans to evolve were meat-eaters. The ancestral condition to all carnivorans is primarily eating meat. Carnivorans are often distinguished from other orders by their shearing molars and premolars - their carnassial teeth, which are essentially huge, slicing murder-molars. Bears, however, have the least developed carnassials, with pandas sitting at the furthest extreme - though their teeth are clearly still based on the carnivoran setup.

Their digestion is the same type of “we’re-trying-but-we’re-not-quite-there-yet”, likely because the earliest “panda” discovered is only about 8 million years old, and the switch to exclusive bamboo-eating is thought to have happened only 2 million years ago. Their gut microbiome is full of bacteria meant for digesting meat, not bamboo, and it turns out they can only digest about 17% of the bamboo they eat.

So pandas are working on becoming wholly specifically herbivorous, but there is some serious room for improvement.

tl;dr: not only are pandas awful from a conservation standpoint, but they are also awful at the one thing they’re supposed to be good at, and it’s all evolution’s fault.