Liligers, tiglons, beefalo and 7 other hybrid animals that actually exist
This cute little creature is very likely the only liliger in the universe. Her name is Kiara, and she was born last week at Novosibirsk Zoo in Russia. Kiara's dad is a lion, but her mom is a liger — a hybrid cross between a lion and a tiger that's bred for (among other things) its skills in magic.
You won't find ligers in the wild, but they do exist, as do the rest of the animals in this gallery.
Hybrid animals don't often occur in the wild for several reasons, the primary one being that different species of animals don't generally try to mate with one another. We humans are not above meddling in interspecies sexuality, though, and we can make it work in the lab and in captivity, both of which we've done a bunch of times. Sometimes it's to try and mix traits of different species of animals to create a hybrid with the best traits of both, but other times it's just because it seems like it would be pretty cool.
The gallery below has a bunch of different animal hybrids in it, some of which you're probably familiar with, an some of with you probably aren't. There are lots more where these came from, but here are a few of our favorites.
Via NatGeo
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You've seen one of these before: it's a mule, a cross between a female horse and a male donkey. As a hybrid, mules are reportedly more patient than horses, and less obstinate and more intelligent than donkeys.
A hinny is a reciprocal hybrid to a mule, as it's a hybrid of a male horse and a female donkey. Hinnies are much rarer than mules.
A particularly tasty hybrid is the mighty beefalo, which you get from mixing a cow with a buffalo. Beefalo are more nutritious and significantly hardier than cattle.
You can also crossbreed buffalo with yaks, making (you guessed it) a yakalo.
A liger, pretty much Napoleon Dynamite's favorite animal, is a hybrid cross between a male lion and a female tiger. Ligers are huge, the largest of all big cats.
Tiglons are like ligers, except from a female lion and a male tiger. They tend to be a bit smaller, and can have spots, stripes, and manes.
You can also throw jaguars and leopards into the mix to get a lijagulep, which is a male lion crossed with a female jaguar-leopard. None of these have been made since the early 1900s, but they likely looked like the (stuffed) jaguar lion hybrid in this pic.
Equids (horse-like things) are fairly easy to intermix, and you can go more exotic by hybridizing zebras with donkeys to get zeeonks, donkras, and zonkeys, as in this picture.
And here's a zebra horse hybrid, a zorse.
Finally, we've got the wholphin, a whale dolphin hybrid. These may exist in the wild, but the only one we're sure about is named Kawili Kai. She lives at Sea Life Park in Hawaii.
