BEIJING -- China's first artificially conceived Milu, or Pere David's deer, has been born in Beijing.
The male fawn was out of danger seven days after its birth on April 11, and was being monitored by staff in the Beijing Nanhaizi Pere David's Deer Park, the Beijing Daily reported on Saturday.
The deer, used to be a unique species in China, were once extinct in China before imported animals were reintroduced in the middle of 1980s.
On July 15 last year, a stud was selected for the artificial insemination of six females.
About 2,000 Pere David's deer exist across the world, but all are descended from 18 animals that lived 100 years ago, the paper said.
This inbreeding caused a low reproduction rate, a sex ratio imbalance, and high rates of difficult and abnormal births, a park spokesman was quoted by the paper as saying.
Wild species of the rare animal have been extinct for over a century. Experts had hoped that the deer would breed once it is returned to its wild habitat.
In November 1998, the Dafeng Reserve, in east China's Jiangsu province returned eight David's deer to the wild and one of the females successfully delivered a fawn in 2003. In the same year, the animal species was removed from the red list of endangered animals published by the World Conservation Union.
However, David's deer is still under A-level state protection in China.
The species was named after Pere David, a French Catholic priest and naturalist who first recorded the existence of the deer in China back in 1865.
Milu were first mentioned in Chinese books more than 2,000 years ago. The wetland deer species bears the odd nickname of "sibuxiang", or "none of the four alike" for its unique features in appearance -- a horse's face, a donkey's tail, cow-like hooves and a stag's antlers.
