Giant pandas and red pandas are not closely related. The giant panda is a bear, in the family Ursidae. The red panda is the only living member of an entirely separate family, Ailuridae, with no close relatives anywhere. They share a name, a mountain range, a diet of bamboo and a false thumb, and almost nothing else.
The name came first to the smaller animal. In older sources, “panda” on its own means the red panda, and the giant panda was originally described as a relative of it. Genetics eventually sorted the giant panda into the bears and left the red panda by itself.
Giant panda vs red panda at a glance #
| Giant panda | Red panda | |
|---|---|---|
| Family | Ursidae (bears) | Ailuridae (only living member) |
| Scientific name | Ailuropoda melanoleuca | Ailurus fulgens |
| Weight | Males up to 250 lb (113 kg); females rarely 220 lb (104 kg) | 8 to 17 lb (3.6 to 7.7 kg) |
| Length | 4 to 6 ft (1.2 to 1.8 m) | 22 to 24.6 in (56 to 62.5 cm) body, plus a 14.6 to 18.6 in tail |
| Diet | About 99% bamboo | About 95% bamboo, plus fruit and blossoms |
| Range | Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu provinces, China | Himalayas: Nepal, northeastern India, Bhutan, Myanmar, southwestern China |
| IUCN status | Vulnerable (since 2016) | Endangered |
| Wild population | Around 1,864 (2011 to 2014 survey) | Estimated around 10,000 |
The size difference is enormous #
A red panda is roughly cat-sized. An adult weighs 8 to 17 pounds, with a body of about two feet and a tail nearly as long again, which it uses for balance in trees and wraps around itself in the cold.
A giant panda is a bear. Males reach up to 250 pounds in the wild and stand two to three feet at the shoulder, with a body four to six feet long. Put side by side, a giant panda outweighs a red panda by a factor of fifteen or more.
They eat the same thing, differently #
Both animals live on bamboo. WWF puts bamboo at about 99% of the giant panda’s diet, with occasional eggs or small animals making up the rest. The Smithsonian’s National Zoo says bamboo makes up about 95% of the red panda’s diet, alongside fruit and blossoms.
The strategies differ because the bodies do. A giant panda works through enormous quantities of roots, stems, shoots and leaves, feeding for 10 to 16 hours a day, because its carnivore’s digestive system extracts very little from what it eats. A red panda, being far smaller and unable to process that volume, is selective, taking the most nutritious parts of the plant rather than everything in front of it. More on the giant panda’s approach in what do pandas eat.
Both grew a thumb that isn’t one #
The strangest thing the two species share is anatomical. Neither has an opposable thumb, because no bear or bear-adjacent carnivore does. Both evolved a workaround: an enlarged wrist bone, a modified sesamoid, covered in a pad of skin, which presses against the paw and grips a bamboo stalk.
They arrived at it independently, which makes it a textbook case of convergent evolution. Two animals from different families, facing the same problem of holding a slippery stalk, produced the same solution out of the same spare bone.
Where they live, and where they overlap #
Giant pandas live in mountain forests across six ranges in three Chinese provinces: Sichuan, Shaanxi and Gansu. Red pandas have a much wider distribution along the Himalayas, through Nepal, northeastern India, Bhutan, Myanmar and southwestern China, at elevations of 2,000 to 4,300 metres.
The two ranges barely touch. The Tibetan Plateau is the only area where both are known to occur, and even there they select different habitat, so encounters are not a normal part of either animal’s life.
Which one is in more trouble #
The red panda, clearly. It’s listed as Endangered by the IUCN, with a global population estimated at around 10,000, and the Smithsonian’s National Zoo reports that researchers believe the total population has declined by 40% over the past two decades. It’s traditionally divided into two subspecies, the Himalayan red panda (A. f. fulgens) and the Chinese red panda (A. f. styani).
The giant panda was downlisted from Endangered to Vulnerable in 2016 after decades of habitat protection, with roughly 1,864 counted in the wild in the 2011 to 2014 national survey and about 600 more in zoos and breeding centres. It remains at risk, and the population is fragmented into 33 isolated sub-populations. The full picture is in are giant pandas still endangered.
The gap in attention is worth noticing. The giant panda has been the emblem of conservation fundraising for sixty years. The red panda, rarer and with no close relatives left to fall back on, gets a fraction of the coverage.
Lifespan #
Giant pandas live about 15 to 20 years in the wild and around 30 in zoos, according to the Smithsonian’s National Zoo. For red pandas the published figures vary more: the Smithsonian says they “may live as long as 23 years”, while other references give shorter figures for animals in human care. Take any single number with caution.
If you came here because you like pandas rather than because you needed the taxonomy, Merge Panda is a free drop-and-merge puzzle built around the giant panda variety. Snacks stack in a bamboo crate and merge upward through eleven tiers, ending with a Panda Cub, a Mama Panda and an Emperor Panda in a crown. No red pandas, which given the above is probably for the best.
Frequently asked questions #
Are red pandas actually pandas? #
Depends which way round you ask it. The red panda had the name first, and the giant panda was named after it. Taxonomically neither is in a family called “panda”: the giant panda is a bear, and the red panda is the sole living member of Ailuridae.
Are red pandas related to raccoons? #
They were grouped with raccoons for a long time, which is why they look like they belong there. Modern classification places the red panda in its own family, Ailuridae, most closely related to the group containing raccoons, weasels and skunks rather than inside it.
Can a giant panda and a red panda have babies together? #
No. They’re in different families and separated by tens of millions of years of evolution, which is far beyond the range where hybrids are possible. They also rarely encounter each other in the wild.
Which is bigger, a giant panda or a red panda? #
The giant panda, by a wide margin. An adult male giant panda can reach 250 pounds; a red panda tops out around 17 pounds. A red panda is closer in size to a large house cat.
Why do both eat bamboo if they aren’t related? #
Because bamboo is abundant in the mountain forests both inhabit, grows year-round, and has almost no competition from other large mammals. Two unrelated animals in the same forests independently specialised on the same abundant food, and both ended up with a false thumb to handle it.