Why you shouldn’t laugh at the pizzly bear – and other hybrids from the animal kingdom

My daughter loves unicorns. They’re graceful creatures, probably the love child of a horse and a narwhal. A true hybrid, in other words. And purely fantasy.

But you don’t just encounter animal hybrids in fables, fairy tales and legends; some also walk amongst us. Biologically speaking, you get hybrids when different genera, species and subspecies reproduce. This happens more often than you might think, both in the wild and artificially. To give you a better idea of what this looks like, let me introduce you to a few animal hybrids.

When crossing a tiger with a lion – and vice versa

Lions are often considered the king of beasts. But that’d probably be the liger: what you get when you put a lion and a tigress together. They’re the biggest big cats ever. According to the Guinness Book of Records, the liger Hercules is 3.3 m long, with a fighting weight of more than 400 kg.

The liger’s hybrid counterpart is the tigon. This cross between a tiger and lioness results in an animal that’s smaller than its parents. The mortality rate of tigon fetuses is also quite high. In the wild, you won’t encounter ligers or tigons because the natural habitats of lions and tigers don’t overlap. Instead, you mostly find them in zoos or circuses that still «work» with wild animals today.

Criss-crossing the realm of cats

As far as creating hybrids goes, human being seems to go in for colourful big cats. There are jaglions (jaguar × lioness), tiguars (tiger × jaguar) and jaguleps (jaguar × leopardess), to name just a few.

Domestic cats are also often mixed and crossed when it comes to breeding. One example is the Savannah cat, which was made by crossing a serval with a domestic cat. In case you’re wondering, a serval is a type of wild cat from the African savannah, hence the name savannah cat.

Savannahs are amongst the most expensive cat breeds in the world. Larger than other domestic cats, they’re superior to them in terms of speed and jumping ability. In addition, unlike most other domestic breeds, the savannah isn’t scared of water.

Hybrids resulting from climate change

Polar bears and grizzlies come from two distinct yet imposing parts of the bear family and live in different habitats. Or at least, they normally do. As a result of the Arctic ice melting, polar bears are spending more and more time on solid ground. Which is where they’d meet a grizzly, who in turn are moving further and further north. Encounters like these gave rise to the pizzly, also known as a grolar bear.

Scientists expect to see more hybrids like the pizzly in future because of climate change, which is displacing many animals’ habitats.

Crossed to give an advantage

Mules are a hybrid that everyone’s probably heard of. Crossing horse mares with donkey stallions is as old as time itself. Mules have been around since the Ancient Orient – in other words, for 11,000 years. In ancient times, they were considered the most noble animals, which is why there were mule vets in the Roman Empire, not horse or steed vets.

To this day, mules are used as draught, pack and riding animals, among others. They’re considered more persistent, resilient and hardy than horses.

Bizarre hybrid research

Humans are quite fond of experimenting with crossing horses and equines anyway. This results in zebroids – the offspring of a zebra (sire) and another type of horse. Zebrules and zorses are some common examples.

The first time a zebra was successfully crossed with a horse was in Russia, all thanks to Ilya Ivanovich Ivanov. The same man failed in his attempt to cross chimpanzees with humans about a hundred years ago. Yeah, you read that right. It’s a documented fact, not a terrible horror film.

Ivanovich Ivanov might not have been successful in his attempt to cross monkeys with humans. But I still have loads of questions. One in particular is: why?