For years, scientists ' and the public ' in China have been fascinated by Qizai, the only brown-and-white panda in captivity. Found abandoned in the wild, he lives at Louguantai Wild Animal Breeding and Protection Center in Xi'An. Only seven brown-and-white pandas have ever been documented ' all from Qinling, a mountain range in the Chinese province of Shaanxi. 'Previous studies2 suggested that Qinling pandas may have been separated from Sichuan pandas around 300,000 years ago,' says Hu, a conservation geneticist at the Institute of Zoology at the Chinese Academy of Sciences (CAS) in Beijing. Hu and his colleagues studied the genomic information of three 'family trios' ' a pair of panda parents and their cub ' associated with two brown pandas, along with the genomes of 29 other black-and-white pandas. The trios were Qizai and his parents; Qizai, his mate and their cub; and Dandan ' the first brown panda to be documented in China, nearly four decades ago ' her mate and their cub....
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