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b"Thanks to Zola for suggesting this week's topic, the red panda!\\n\\nFurther reading:\\n\\nStudy Reveals Key Differences in Skulls of Red and Giant Panda\\n\\nA red panda:\\n\\n\\n\\nA red panda asleep in a tree [photo by By Aconcagua - Own work, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=2169002]:\\n\\n\\n\\nNot exactly a real red panda but pretty darn cute (from the Disney/Pixar movie Turning Red):\\n\\n\\n\\nShow transcript:\\nWelcome to Strange Animals Podcast. I\\u2019m your host, Kate Shaw.\\nHappy new year! I\\u2019m still getting over covid but feeling much better and have mostly regained my sense of smell and taste. I\\u2019m still coughing, though, so apologies that my voice doesn\\u2019t sound great (at least, I don\\u2019t think it does).\\nOne of my goals for this year is to really clear out the backlog of suggested topics. So many people have sent me such great ideas for episodes, and while I really do try to get to as many of them as possible, some people have been waiting literally years for me to cover their suggestion. So I\\u2019m just going to pick one every week until we\\u2019re more or less caught up.\\nWe\\u2019ll start with someone who\\u2019s probably used to being at the end of the line when you have to line up alphabetically. Zola suggested the red panda and I have no idea why we\\u2019ve never talked about this amazing animal!\\nThe red panda lives in parts of the Himalaya Mountains in various countries, including China, India, Tibet, Myanmar, and Nepal, where it mostly lives in high elevations where there\\u2019s plenty of water and bamboo. When it gets really cold, it can lower its metabolism and enter a torpid state something like hibernation, although only for short amounts of time, and it also wraps itself up in its big fluffy tail to stay warm. It\\u2019s mostly nocturnal and spends a lot of time in trees, although it\\u2019s perfectly comfortable on the ground too, although it almost always sleeps in a tree.\\nThe red panda is about the size of a dog but with short legs. It\\u2019s bigger than a raccoon but resembles one superficially, including a bushy ringed tail and a dark stripe across the eyes that continues down the cheeks. It\\u2019s mostly reddish-brown or orangey in color, with white markings on the ears and face and darker red or black belly and legs. Its tail is almost as long as its body, around 19 inches long for a big male, or 48 cm, while its head and body is about 25 inches long, or 63 cm. It has a round head with a short muzzle and big triangular ears.\\nThe red panda has a lot in common with the giant panda, and that has caused a lot of confusion in the past and even today. We talked about the giant panda in episode 42, including its extra toe. It\\u2019s not really a toe although it acts like a thumb. The giant panda\\u2019s front paws have five toes just like all bears, and also a modified wrist bone that juts out from the base of the paw and helps the panda hold bamboo stalks as it eats the leaves.\\nThe red panda has a false thumb too, also formed from a projecting wrist bone. It\\u2019s not as dexterous as the giant panda\\u2019s false thumb, but both animals use it to help it hold bamboo. In the red panda\\u2019s case, though, the false thumb probably originally evolved to help it climb trees. It also has flexible joints in its legs that allow it to climb more easily, including straight down a tree head-first, and it has semi-retractable claws.\\nThe red panda even lives in some of the same places as the giant panda. Researchers weren\\u2019t sure how the two species could live in the same places and eat the same foods without one species out-competing the other. The red panda mostly eats bamboo just as the giant panda does, and both are considered carnivores even though they hardly eat anything but plants, but a study published in 2014 determined that the two animals actually eat different parts of the bamboo plant. The red panda is able to climb up to eat the smaller, more tender leaves and stems while the giant panda has a stronger jaw that allows it to eat larger, tougher leaves and shoots."