Giant Panda

A bear native to a handful of mountain ranges in central China, instantly recognizable by its black and white coat, and unusual among bears for a diet that is almost entirely bamboo despite a digestive system still built like that of a carnivore, extracting relatively little energy from each mouthful and compensating by eating for most of its waking hours. A modified wrist bone functions as a false thumb, letting the panda grip bamboo stalks with a precision most bears cannot manage. Decades of habitat protection and captive breeding, paired with China's reclassification of panda habitat into a connected network of reserves, moved the giant panda off the Endangered list in 2016, though its range remains fragmented into more than thirty isolated pockets of forest that limit genetic exchange between subpopulations.