The Giant Panda of China is one of the rarest animals in the world. Giant pandas live in remote high mountains in Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu Provinces and eat bamboo. They are a surviving species of the Fourth Ice Age and are known as a "living fossil". They are regarded as China's "national treasure".

Genus and Species	Ailuropoda melanoleuca
Family	Ursidae
Order	Carnivora

    The Giant Panda is a large sturdy bear-like mammal with a very thick woolly black and white coat. The ears, eye patches, legs and shoulders are black and the rest of the body is white. The nose is black. The forepaws have an extended pad on the sole and on the first digit to assist in climbing and grasping bamboo. Giant pandas stand between two and three feet tall at the shoulder (on all four legs), and reach four to six feet long. Males are larger than females, weighing up to 250 pounds in the wild. Females rarely reach 220 pounds.

    Although it has a body like a carnivore, closely related to the bear family, Giant Panda specializes in mainly vegetarian diet, consisting mainly of the shoots and roots of bamboo. They sometimes eat other plants such as horsetails and pine bark. They also occasionally eat carcasses and catch small animals.

    They inhabit in mountain forests with dense stands of bamboo, at an elevation of between 1400 and 3500 meters, but descending as low as 800 meters in winter. They live mostly on the ground but are good tree climbers, often sheltering in hollow trees, rock crevasses and caves.

    The Giant Panda is mostly shy and nocturnal. They are solitary, with individual home ranges of about 2.5 square kilometers, but they share the surrounding areas with other individuals. During the mating season they may expand the sizes of their ranges. They mark their trails with scent from an anal gland. Adult giant pandas are generally solitary, but they do communicate periodically through scent marks, calls, and occasional meetings.

    Scientists are not sure how long giant pandas live in the wild, but they are sure it is shorter than lifespan in zoos. Chinese scientists have reported zoo pandas as old as 35.

    The giant panda is listed as endangered in the World Conservation Union's (IUCN's) Red List of Threatened Animals. There are about 1,000 left in the wild. About 140 pandas live in zoos and breeding centers around the world, mostly in China.