CHENGDU, Aug. 1 (Xinhua) -- The world's first giant panda cub with both captive and wild parents was born early Monday in southwest China's Sichuan Province.

The cub marked success in experiments to encourage captive pandas to mate with wild pandas in order to increase the genetic diversity of the captive stock, according to Zhang Zhizhong, Communist Party of China chief of China Conservation and Research Center for the Giant Panda (CCRCGP).

The 15-year-old female giant panda Cao Cao gave birth to the cub at 2:17 a.m. at the Hetaoping semi-wild training base. She started to show signs of pregnancy on July 1 and went into labour on July 30.

The female cub weighed 216 grams, compared to the normal newborn wegiht of around 150 grams.

Wu Daifu with the training base attributed the cub's unusually high weight to the good health and appetite of the mother during pregnancy.

Wearing a positioning system and a recording device on her neck Graham Zusi World Cup Jersey , Cao Cao, was released into the wild on March 1. She lived there for nearly two months.

The recording device showed that Cao Cao went into heat on March 11 and mated with a wild male panda on March 23. The mating lasted for one minute and 30 seconds.

Cao Cao was born in the wild and was rescued by the CCRCGP in 2003 at 2 years old. She has delivered six cubs in captivity, including two pairs of twins.

For the most of the last seven years, she has lived at the Hetaoping training center, where she demonstrated strong adaptability to living in the wild.

The CCRCGP launched an experiment in late 2016 to bring in genes from the wild population to make the captive pandas healthier. As of the end of last year Geoff Cameron World Cup Jersey , the worldwide captive giant panda population stood at 471, leading to growing concerns of inbreeding, Wu said.

Zhang Hemin, deputy head of the center, said babies from captive and wild parents would enrich the gene pool of the captive stock.

SAN FRANCISCO Fabian Johnson World Cup Jersey , Sept. 18 (Xinhua) -- Animals neither too big, nor too small, but just the right size face a lower risk of extinction than those on both ends of the scale, an international research team has found.

Their report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, the official journal of the American National Academy of Sciences Ethan Horvath World Cup Jersey , concludes that worldwide, the largest and smallest species face a greater risk of extinction than mid-sized animals.

Based on their study of more than 27,000 vertebrate animal species in the "Red List", the International Union for Conservation of Nature's compendium of endangered species, the researchers from the United States Eric Lichaj World Cup Jersey , Australia and Switzerland found that disproportionate losses at the large and small ends of the scale raise the likelihood of significant changes to the way natural ecosystems function in forests, grasslands, oceans and even rivers and streams.

Among the groups of animals evaluated were birds, reptiles, amphibians Edgar Castillo World Cup Jersey , bony fishes, cartilaginous fishes and mammals, including about 4,400 species currently threatened with extinction.

The largest animals are threatened principally with harvesting by humans.

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