Adorable Red Panda cub born at Darjeeling zoo

Darjeeling, June 6: A red panda gave birth to a cub at the Topkey Dara Conservation Breeding Center under Padmaja Naidu Himalayan Zoological Park, Darjeeling.

Red Panda is an arboreal species and is marked as an endangered animal in India. They are found in the forests of Sikkim, Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, and North Bengal and it is estimated by The International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) that there are only 5,000 to 6,000 of them currently in India.

Prasanna, a zoo-bred red panda gave birth to a cub at the Tobgeydanra conservation breeding centre under the Pnzhp. The cub has been fathered by Kimbu. Both the mother and cub are doing fine.

With the newborn cub (sex not determined) the count of red pandas has gone up to 23.

The researches being conducted on endangered species has brought to light many interesting facts. A recent genetic study conducted in 2020 showed that there are not one but two kinds of red panda in the South-Asian region.


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Published in the Science Advances by the researchers at the Chinese Academy of Sciences in Beijing, it stated that the Chinese red Panda and the Himalayan red panda that were earlier thought to be the related subspecies were actually quite different in their genetic features.

Noting the development in their genetic origin, the researchers were compelled to believe the two species of red pandas from different terrain split 200,000 years ago without any significant genetic transfer between them.