But surprisingly, there are many examples of hybrids that actually can have babies. This happens when the hybrid mates with another hybrid, or with the same species as one of its parents. For example, when lions and tigers hybridize they produce a liger.
Many hybrid animals are sterile. That means they may be able to mate, but they won't create offspring. For example, mules are the hybrid offspring of horses and donkeys. Most of these are sterile: Two mules can't make more mules.
A wholphin, a cross between a female bottle-nosed dolphin and a male false killer whale, is one of the rarest hybrid animals on earth.
Though many hybrid animals are infertile, ligers and tigons are not. They are perfectly capable of breeding and producing Li-Tigons, Ti-Ligers and other such amalgamations.
Although they rarely meet in the wild, lions and tigers are still so closely related that they are able to interbreed, and in captivity they occasionally do. But successful interbreeding is the key, and the hybrid offspring are usually sterile and short-lived.
A jaglion or jaguon is the offspring between a male jaguar and a female lion (lioness). A mounted specimen is on display at the Walter Rothschild Zoological Museum, Hertfordshire, England. It has the lion's background color, brown, jaguar-like rosettes and the powerful build of the jaguar.
A leopon /ˈlɛpən/ (portmanteau of leopard and lion) is the hybrid offspring of a male leopard and a female lion. The head of the animal is similar to that of a lion while the rest of the body carries similarities to leopards. These hybrids are produced in captivity and are unlikely to occur in the wild.
Herculean cat! A giant 10-feet-long liger — hybrid of a tigress and a lion — has been named the world's biggest cat by Guinness World Records. The liger appropriately named Hercules weighs 418kg and lives at Myrtle Beach Safari Wildlife preserve in South Carolina.
There have been none reported, but if a Cheetah hybrid were possible, the puma (puma concolor) or its close relative, the jaguarundi (herpalious yagoauroundi) are its closest relatives and most likely candidates. The three species comprise the puma lineage, which diverged from the lynx lineage millions of years ago.
Moreover, male ligers have lowered testosterone levels and sperm counts, rendering them infertile while females, though capable of reproducing with either a lion or a tiger, often give birth to sickly cubs that don?t survive.
Probably not. Ethical considerations preclude definitive research on the subject, but it's safe to say that human DNA has become so different from that of other animals that interbreeding would likely be impossible.
Ligers are fertile and can mate with other ligers, lions, or tigers. Fertile hybrids create a very complex problem in science, because this breaks a rule from the Biological Species Concept—that two separate species should not be able to breed and have fertile offspring.
In fact, such human-animal hybrids are often referred to as “chimeras”.
As with other hybrid animals, including both Zonkeys and Mules, Zorses are sterile, meaning that although they still display normal breeding behavior, they are unable to produce offspring of their own.
There are no known successful attempts in the mating of these species, either from a jaguar/tigress or a tiger/jaguaress pairing. Any offspring would probably be named according to portmanteau conventions as jagger or tiguar, and any such hybrid would probably resemble the Dogla though more powerfully built.
Since the black panther is simply a black form of leopard, these can breed with regular spotted leopards. The offspring are not hybrids. See Mutant Big Cats for more information on black leopards.
They can! Hybrid offspring of lynx and bobcats are called blynx or lynxcats. Unlike other hybrid animal species, it's common for these animals to be able to have offspring of their own.
It is not impossible for a liger to be white, but it is very rare. The first known white ligers were born in December 2013 at Myrtle Beach Safari in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina to a white male lion and a white female tiger.
But many of the crossbreeds live healthy lives, and some have even produced offspring—a female liger in a Russian zoo mated with a male lion and gave birth to a so-called liliger in 2012.
Weighing in at up to 300kg and measuring 3m long, the tiger takes the title for the world's largest cat species. Specifically the Siberian tiger (Panthera tigris altaica), also known as the Amur tiger, a subspecies found in the north-west of China, the far east of Russia and potentially North Korea.
While ligers can be gigantic, they are not aggressive animals. In zoos and other sanctuaries, ligers are reported to gently interact with their handlers. They also love to swim like tigers and are very fast hunters in the wild. Tigers, however, are more territorial and prefer to live alone.
The large Liger growth is a result of its parents (Mother Tiger and Father Lion) not possessing the limiting growth gene. This limiting growth gene is found in male TIgers and female lions which is why most researchers believe Tigons are on average smaller than their parents exhibiting negative growth dysplasia.
Cats are unique among mammals in that over forty genetic crosses between different wild cat species, and between wild cats and domestic cats, have been documented to produce viable hybrid offspring (Figure 1). Popular examples include the liger (male lion x female tiger) and tigon (male tiger x female liger).