While it's true, as the antepenultimate paragraph avers, that pandas are "related to raccoons", it's like saying that humans are related to bats; both groups are relatively close to each other compared to other mammals, but both have closer relatives.
Molecular data roots the giant pandas in the bears, albeit as the oldest divergence from the line. (See the Tree of Life for a terser but more authoritative restatement.) Bears (ursids) and raccoons (procyonids) are sister groups, but the last common ancestor of giant pandas and raccoons also includes all other ursids and all other procyonids among its descendants. Anatomical details of the jaw and skull of giant pandas have some raccoon-like characteristics, but that's not as convincing as the molecular details; the designation of the giant panda as a procyonid sister group is years out of date.
The same molecular data also puts the lesser panda in the raccoons, meaning the two pandas aren't particularly close to each other.
Pandas are, incidentally, not unattractive, but they're just dumb: They can't breed worth shit and they have a weird, restricted diet that's caused them to kluge their anatomy. If you were trying to design a creature whom pressure from man would drive extinct, you'd end up with a large, dangerous, kluged, diet-restricted, slow-breeding mammal.[1] Compare to koalas: They're more temperamental and diet-restricted, but they breed easily, they're small, they're not kluged (aside from a toxic waste dump of a digestive system, they're unexceptional marsupials), and nothing else in creation wants to live on eucalyptus or where eucalyptus grows.
[1] If you're paying attention, you've already figured out what we did to Australopithecus robustus.
Posted by Greg at August 2, 2005 1:34 PM