Vision and Smell
- Poor visual acuity
- Pupil has vertical slit like domestic cats (found in many nocturnal animals)
- Acute sense of smell
Hearing (Owen et al. 2016a)
- Functional hearing range: 0.10 kHz (lower limit) to 70.0 kHz (upper limit)
- Good sensitivity: 10.0-16.0 kHz
- Best sensitivity: 12.5-14.0 kHz
- Can hear into the ultrasonic range (a trait which may be an ancestral trait among mammals)
- Increases in ambient noise may mask acoustic signals, which potentially could impact reproductive success
Digestive specializations
- Unusual gut for an animal that eats only plants (Loeffler et al. 2006)
- Length much shorter than is expected
- Total length only 4 times the length of the body
- Length more similar to that of meat-eating carnivores
- Guts 10 to 22 times body length seen in other exclusive plant eaters such as deer
- Digestion considered unspecialized (Loeffler et al. 2006)
- Stomach simple
- No foregut fermentation
- No caecum thus no hindgut fermentation
- Recent genome sequencing detects no digestive enzymes specifically for plant cellulose (Li et al. 2010)
- Microbes aid bamboo digestion (e.g., Zhu et al. 2011)
Dentition
- 2nd and 3rd premolars well developed (from Chorn & Hoffmann 1978; Edwards et al. 2006)
- Unlike the pattern seen in other bears
- Molars
- Broad and flat with extra cusps (from Chorn & Hoffmann 1978; Edwards et al. 2006)
- Similar to extinct plant-eating European cave bears
- Carnassial teeth (upper 4th premolar/lower 1st molar)
- Teeth with reduced slicing capacity compared to most other carnivores (Hunt 2004)