Horse (equus ferus caballus) + donkey (equus asinus) = mule
In general, the most widely cited definition of what a species even is is a group who’s members can produce fertile offspring. But there are still edge cases like ring species, where population A can mate with population B, population B can mate with population C, but A and C can’t.
If you’ll permit me one of my linguistics tangents, there’s an analogous phenomenon called a dialect continuum, where dialect A is intelligible to speakers of dialect B, dialect B is intelligible to speakers of dialect C, but A and C are not mutually intelligible.
Ligers (products of male lions and female tigers), and tigons (product of female lions and male tigers).
Male ligers are sterile, but female ones can reproduce. Same with tigons.
Those are results of what I think are disgusting, unnatural experiments.
Those are the results of keeping individuals of both species and opposite sex in the same enclosure. The reproduction part happened all by itself.
tbf, teaching a lion how a condom works is quite tedious
I think you’re getting downvoted because you sound like a troll, but perhaps you just don’t understand something that most of us learn in primary school. Did you grow up homeschooled or in a country without basic education?
If you’re not trolling, this isn’t your fault and people shouldn’t be downvoting you for asking questions.
So long as you’re willing to learn, ignore the downvotes. You need to understand that your views on this are misinformed, though, and they sound based in religious fundamentalism.
Some of y’all over here use the word troll too liberally
If you smell shit everywhere you go, check your shoes.
Not really experiments carried out by humans, more of a didn’t prevent it from happening.
But lions and tigers don’t breed naturally, do they?
They don’t share territory currently, so no. Even before they barely shared territory, looking at some maps there is only slight overlap with the most eastern lions and most western tigers. Not sure if they shared that small overlap at the same time either.
Humans did. There was regular crossbreeding producing hybrids between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
Other species can produce hybrids, but i dont know of any that do so regularly
Not like that. I mean of completely different kind.
“Kind” is a meaningless word here.
Humans (Sapiens) were a different species of Homo than Neanderthals (Neanderthalensis); both are in the genus Homo.
Thus: Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis.This is exactly like lions (Leo) and tigers (Tigris) being different species, but in the same genus (Panthera).
Thus: Panthera Leo and Panthera Tigris.And just like with lions and tigers, offspring are often either infertile or only fertile in one direction – IIRC, human/neanderthal couplings only produced fertile offspring if the human was female and the neanderthal male (we can see this in our own DNA).
Just to point out kind is frequently used by proponents of devine/intelligent design pseudoscience to muddy the waters in arguing established biology because terms like species or clade etc refutes their biblical arguments. Not saying that this is what the poster belongs to, it could just be a knowledge gap.
Simply put, no.
The nearest you can get to the notion you are trying to explore are crossbreeds between horses and donkeys, dogs and wolves, and captivity involuntary crossbreeding of large cats.
These crossbreedings are only possible because the animals involved share a common ancestor that is still close enough in the evolutionary history to allow the mating, fertilization and subsequent successful carrying of offspring.
Dogs and wolves are so close as species their offspring is completely viable. Dogs (canis familiaris) are technically a sub species of wolves (canis lupus).
Some crossbreeds of big cats are infertile and some are genetically viable. The mating and crossbreeding is possible because all cats are in the same family (felidae), hence, still very close but already far enough between species that offspring may or may not be viable (capable of reproducing afterwards).
Donkeys and horses are already far apart enough that any offspring is completely inviable.
So, by this same logic, the more far apart two species are from their common ancestors, the more difficult it becomes to achieve successful crossbreeding or crossbreeding at all.
A cat and a dog can not crossbreed. A bear and a dog can not crossbreed. Humans and apes can not crossbreed.
No animal, no life form, can successfully reproduce with another if they are not of the same species or do not share very, very close ancestry.
So humans and chimps are genetically further apart than horses and donkeys, wolves and dogs?
Yes.
The common ancestor from which all great apes - chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans and humans - derived and evolved is so far away in evolutionary history that crossbreeding simply became impossible.
Logic and empiric evidence from other animals, today, suggests there was a period of time where these diverging species could still intermingle and crossbreed. At least in theory. It would be quite hard to take such events as granted and even more to prove it.
What can be asserted is that through a time scale that is incredibly hard to conceptualize for most - millions of years - from a common ancestor several new species evolved, adapting to their environment and changing in response to it, to the point the “cousins” can no longer recognize each other as such.
Lions, panthers, leopards, pumas, tigers
Oh my!
