Incredibly rare panda triplets born in China

Here's something for the record books: a panda at Guangzhou’s Chimelong Safari Park gave birth to triplets July 29, and all three are still alive.

The zoo says that this is the first known set of panda triplets to ever survive. Pandas have a notoriously low reproductive rate, and just 1,600 remain in China in the wild. After Juxiao delivered the babies, she was too tired to attend to them, AFP reports, so they were whisked away to incubators and taken care of by zoo staff. Now that their mother has recovered, the triplets are nursing with her, and also have a team of feeders at their beck and call 24 hours a day.

Not much else is known about the tiny cubs, whose names will be revealed later. An official with the Sichuan Wolong National Natural Reserve said that because of the enormously high mortality rates among newborn pandas, "the triplets can be described as a new wonder of the world." --Catherine Garcia

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Catherine Garcia has worked as a senior writer at The Week since 2014. Her writing and reporting have appeared in Entertainment Weekly, The New York Times, Wirecutter, NBC News and "The Book of Jezebel," among others. She's a graduate of the University of Redlands and the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.