A few years ago, I remember seeing something on TV. It was something about scientists discovering a hybrid dog that they decided to name chupacabra, after the mythical creature. I was really freaked out by it, and then I thought "That actually seems cool." I decided to get a little bit more in depth with hybrid animals, so I'll be making a blog post about them.
I'm going to talk about how hybrids occur. It happens when two genetically distinct animals mate with each other. The mating usually occurs between two different animals of the same genus, which is the first part in a scientific name of an animal. The hybrid displays traits from both of the parents. Sterility is what keeps those 'chimera' genes from passing onto other animals. Sterility is usually defined by the amount of chromosomes that the hybrid animal has. A reciprocal hybrid is what happens depending on what the genders of the two animals are. If you, for example, when a male donkey and a female horse mate, you would get a mule. If you change the genders around, and make it a female donkey and male horse mating, you would get a hinny. The mule and hinny would have 63 chromosomes, as compared to the horse and donkey's 64 chromosomes. That would prevent a mule from mating with a donkey. That's really all I have to share about hybrid animals, and I'm glad even I have more understanding of this subject now. To close, here's a picture of one of my favorite hybrid animals, which occurs when you mix three completely different animals with Greek mythology.
Picture found at http://dragonsdogma.wikia.com/wiki/Chimera
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