The controversy began in the year 1869 when the giant panda was first described by Pere Armand David, a French missionary and naturalist based in China. David recognized the panda as a species new to science and named it Ursus melanoleucus (for black-and-white bear). The following year Alphonse Milne-Edwards, a colleague of David's (and later director of the Museum of Natural History in Paris), examined skeletal material sent to him by David and concluded that the giant panda was more closely related to the lesser or red panda, Ailurus fulgens (also from China), than it was to a bear. Because the ancestry of the red panda had already been established (it was considered a member of the raccoon family), MilneEdwards believed the bearlike appearance of the giant panda was a holdover from the past, a reflection of its descent from an ancestor common to both bears and raccoons. He renamed it Ailuropoda melanoleuca.
