New fossils suggest ancient pandas ompeted with the largest known apes for habitat and food nearly half a million years ago on the tropical coast of southern China, scientists say. The 400,000-year-old fossils of a giant panda were uncovered alongside the remains of a titan-sized, ancient ape called Gigantopithecus blacki, said Huang Wanbo, a paleontologist at Beijing’s Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology.