Red Panda Lineage

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Download the dataset (JSON)

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If you love Red Pandas and want to contribute to a public family tree, look into our Contribution Instructions!

Summary

The global red panda population is estimated at under 10,000 animals, and around 1000 of these animals are distributed across zoos worldwide.

The Red Panda Lineage dataset is a flat-file human-editable dataset of pandas. A small group of passionate red panda lovers manually curates this dataset by making updates or commits to this repository.

When a commit is accepted, Github Actions will run the bundled Python scripts, and publish a single JSON file to the GitHub pages branch of this repository. This file is queryable using the Dagoba graph query language, allowing a fully browser-based red panda lineage viewer to be written. Peek at our Design Documentation for more details.

Updates

As of August 12, 2026, the redpanda.json format has seen significant changes.

• .txt fields with numeric suffixes become arrays of values
  • location.X => an array of location objects
  • photo.X and photo.X.subfield => array of photo objects
• .txt fields with a language prefix become objects keyed by language values
  • en.name and ja.name => one name object with en and ja values
  • en.othernames and ja.othernames => one othernames object with en and ja lists
• Nodes in the graph now have a type parameter for type discrimination
  • TypeScript can infer when code uses NodePanda, NodeZoo, or other node types

The underlying .txt file format is unchanged, because that format is simple to hand-type and manually review. But the JSON file now has a much simpler structure, intended for processing into consistent objects by a strongly-typed language, such as TypeScript.

Currently TypeScript is only used for building the JSON file, but I intend to use it for the entire redpandafinder codebase. I hope these changes improve the code quality and data consistency for anyone working with the redpanda-lineage JSON data.

Credits

This Red Panda Lineage dataset was started by wumpwoast (Justin Fairchild) in June 2018, with the help and support of firefoxpanda88 and daniele.tokyo, a beautiful redesign by washimumu, and dedication of Red Panda fans in Japan and world-wide on Instagram and YouTube.