Sometimes it’s us humans messing with nature for the purposes of food or scientific curiosity, but sometimes the most incredible of animal hybrids are simply something that occurs in nature, creating the most wonderfully weird and intriguing creatures.
Zebroid
The combination of a Zebra with any other kind of equine (horses, donkeys, zebras), although each specific hybrid has a unique name – Zorse, Zony or a Zonkey.
Liger
A hybrid cross between a male lion and a tigress, producing the biggest cat in the world. A tiglon, a cross between a tiger and a lioness, creates hybrids who grow to the size of male tigers. Ligers only exist in captivity.
Beefalo
A hybrid between domestic cattle and the American Bison, created to combine the characteristics of both animals with a view towards beef production.
Leopon
People love making hybrids with Lions. A Leopon is a result of what you get when you mate a male leopard with a lioness, getting something similar to the head of a lion and the body of a leopard. They also enjoy climbing trees like leopards do.
Grizzly-Polar Bear Hybrid
This hybrid is something that actually does occur in the wild, with the existence of the occurrence confirmed by DNA testing in 2006, taken from a bear that was shot on the Northwest Territories in Canada back in 2006.
Sheep-Goat Hybrid
Not to be confused with the geep, a Sheep-goat Chimera, produced by combining the embryos of a goat and a sheep. The hybrid is produced by the mating between the two animals, but they belong to different genera and have a difference of six chromosomes between them. The offspring of the pairing are usually stillborn.
In 2000, a male sheep impregnated a female goat resulting in a live offspring, which was called the ‘toast of Botswana’, later castrated, like all the other kids and lambs in the herd.
Iron-Age Pig
Another hybrid created mostly for food purposes, but also to recreate he type of pig represented by prehistoric art works of the Iron Age. The breeding of a wild boar and a domestic pig creates rather hard to handle and very aggressive farm animals.
Wholphin
A very rare hybrid, born from the mating of a female bottlenose dolphin with a male False Killer Whale, and although the name suggests a hybrid of a whale and a dolphin, they’re both within the oceanic dolphin family.
Dzo
A Dzo is the male hubrid of a Yak and domestic cattle. It’s sterile, but larger and stronger than yak or cattle from the region. The female hybrid, called dzomo in Tibet, are fertile. They are thought to be more productive than cattle or yaks in terms of both milk and meat production.
