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World's oldest "panda grandpa" dies in China

Xinhua, December 28, 2016 Adjust font size:

Pan Pan, the world's oldest male panda, died at 31 in southwest China's Sichuan Province Wednesday morning.

Pan Pan passed away at 4:50 a.m. An autopsy is being carried out to find the cause of his death, said Tan Chengbin, a keeper with the Dujiangyan base of the China Conservation and Research Center for Giant Panda.

Tan told Xinhua that Pan Pan, who was aged equivalent to about 100 human years, had been living with cancer and that his health deteriorated in the past three days.

Pan Pan was born in the wild in Sichuan's Baoxing County in 1985, but lived in captivity from just a few months old.

Pandas are notoriously difficult to breed, but Pan Pan fathered many cubs over the past 20 years. He has more than 130 descendants, accounting for 25 percent of the world's captively bred panda population. Endit