Lisa Badalich, age 11, of South St. Paul, Minnesota, for her question:

Is it true that the panda is not a bear?

So it looks as if they will arrive as promised, those two fabulous giant pandas from China. None of their kinfolk have lived in American zoos since the 1950s, so let's brush up on their backgrounds. The Chinese call this animal Beishung, which means "the white bear." Perhaps our new arrivals will not feel insulted if we call them bears. But after a lot of careful study, naturalists assure us that they are not related to our crotchety brown bears, or to any other member of the animal family Ursidae.

Apparently, the patchy pandas are kin to our charming raccoons, even though they look for all the world like bulky black and white bears. Most zoologists classify them in the raccoon family Procyonidae. Though some of them place the giant panda in his own private subfamily, Ailurinae. All the experts seem to agree on his personal name, which is Ailuropoda melanoleuca. This fancy name, of course, gives his genus with a capital letter and his species with no capital.