It took some time to properly classify the panda as a bear. But even then, there are still some differences between Giant Pandas and other bears.

A Brown Bear.
Humans have a particularly interesting trait, we really like to classify things neatly and avoid confusion.
But if there’s one creature that caused some confusion for a while, it’s the Giant Panda. This creature shares similarities with two distinct group of animals; the bears and the raccoon.
In fact, at the earlier stage when researchers studied the panda, they placed it in the same family as bears. Later on, another scientist, a Frenchman named Alphonse Milne-Edwards, studied the