What is the average weight of a newborn giant panda?

The average weight of a newborn giant panda is about 100 grams. That is astonishingly small compared with the mother, making a panda cub roughly one-nine-hundredth of her weight at birth.

Newborn giant pandas are pink, blind and nearly hairless, with only a sparse covering of fine white fur. They are helpless and cannot regulate their body temperature well, so the mother keeps the cub close and nurses it intensively. A female may give birth to twins, but she usually raises only one cub successfully in the wild.

The cub’s tiny size is not evidence that it is a different kind of mammal; giant pandas are bears, despite their specialized bamboo diet. Their young develop rapidly after birth. They gain weight quickly on milk, begin developing the familiar black-and-white coat, and eventually start sampling bamboo. Adult pandas can weigh more than 100 kilograms, creating one of the most dramatic size differences between a mammal mother and her newborn.