Pandas are picky eaters. The conservation icons live off a nearly exclusive diet of bamboo. Now, researchers have shown that ancient pandas once had a much broader palette and lived in a wider region. The discovery overturns a long-held belief that while pandas descended from meat-eating animals, they have been dining on bamboo for millions of years.

“It has been widely accepted that giant pandas exclusively feed [on] bamboo [since] a long time ago — 2 millions years,” said Fuwen Wei, a