Because this isn’t a panda at all:
This is a panda:
In 1879 a researcher named Alphonse Milne-Edwards examined a giant panda skeleton and decided that it was most closely related to the red panda, which had been studied since the early 1800s. This set off around a century and a half of fighting among scientists about whether the giant panda was a bear or not. This was eventually settled in the 2000s when genetic analysis proved, once and for all, that giant pandas are bears.
They are very strange bears. They are the most distantly related to the main branch of bears. But they aren’t pandas. The similarities between giant pandas and red pandas appear to be convergent evolution.
The red panda is the only panda. It has no living relatives to also call pandas. Bears have a species named “panda” because that specific species got mistaken for a panda a century and a half ago. No other such mistake has happened.
Here’s a panda donkey.
