Can lions and tigers mate?

The history of lion-tiger hybrids dates to at least the early 19th century in India. In 1798, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) made a colour plate of the offspring of a lion and a tiger. The portmanteau"liger" was coined by the 1930s. read more

When your chromosomes and genes precisely match up, that's not problematic - in fact, advantageous; that's how genetic diversity is created - but if the lion and tiger, for example, have a gene for an essential function in a very slightly different place on the chromosome, swapping a bit of one chromosome for a chunk of its opposite in the same physical location on the chromosome is almost certain to interfere with the function performed by that gene. read more

The history of lion-tiger hybrids dates to at least the early 19th century in India. In 1798, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) made a colour plate of the offspring of a lion and a tiger. The portmanteau "liger" was coined by the 1930s. read more

In fact, the most common scientific definition of a species takes advantage of this: if a hybrid of two organisms can undergo meiosis and produce viable offspring, then by definition, those two organisms are members of the same species. read more