How did the giant panda lose its taste for flesh?

LONDON - A new research has explained how the giant panda lost its taste for flesh.

According to researchers, the answer may lie in the gene that codes for the umami taste receptor.

Jianzhi Zhang at the University of Michigan and his colleagues said that it seems that pandas have an inactive version of the Tas1r1 gene that allows us to taste umami, reports New Scientist.

They discovered that Tas1r1 stopped working about 4.2 million years ago. Fossil records have shown that ancestors of the giant pandas swapped meat for bamboo between 7 and 2 million years ago.

The team is also suspecting the bears were caught out by environmental changes that wiped out a lot of their prey.

When pandas changed diets the Tas1r1 gene became obsolete and, without it, they might not have wanted to eat meat even when it became plentiful. (ANI)