It is suggested that "imprinting" occurs in kittens raised by dogs and in puppies raised by cats. Modern science does away with the need to mate two animals together and can give us laboratory engineered hybrids such as the "geep" (goat/sheep), the cama or camellama (camel/llama) and transgenic creatures where foreign genes have been inserted into the developing egg. zebra/horse, lion/tiger, whale/dolphin, wolf/dog. In real life, hybrids can only occur between closely related creatures and only if they can be persuaded to mate with each other e.g.
The creators of one popular role-play game invented winged felines which were magical owl/cat winged hybrids and I used to play a role-play game which had lion-centaurs (leonars). a part-hippo opera singer and part-racoon nurses. Michael G Coney created races of "specialists" - humans scientifically enhanced with animal genes - in his books "Cat Karina" and "Gods of the Greataway" e.g. A web-search finds all manner of human/animal hybrids such as "anthro-panthers" and "anthro-wolves". The photographs show a Merlion (Mer-Lion), a Singaporean emblem with the head of a lion and the body and tail of a fish and an American possum.Ĭartoons, particularly Japanese cartoons (anime), feature mutant animals, hybrids, shape-changing animals and anthropomorphic (humanised) creatures. The writer could hardly believe the report of a fruitful coupling of a dog with a human female, especially given their distant relationship and different body organization. Rafinesque had reported a hybrid fertile mating of a cat and an opossum (didelfo). Of the phenomena of hybridity in more distantly related species, the writer was dubious of cases reported by Rafinesque in his Annals of General Physical Sciences. The horse or zebra and the donkey, the bison and the cow, the wolf and the dog, the ram and the goat, were all possible because they were closely related and similar in size and type. were-tigers in modern fantasy books.Ītti della Accademia Gioenia di Scienze Naturali in Catania, Volumes 8-9 (this was an annual publication and the item in question was originally published in 1835) mentioned a number of hybrids. Similarly there are other were creatures e.g. All around the world there are tales of were-creatures (lycanthropes) for example werewolves, which are usually shown as hairy humans with various wolflike features. The Sphynx (human-headed lion) is common to many ancient mythologies. The ancient Egyptians depicted many of their gods as human/animal hybrids, usually with an animal's head on a human body. The ancient Greeks and Romans depicted griffons (lion/eagle hybrid), hippogriffs (griffin/horse hybrids), minotaurs (bull/human hybrids), satyrs (goat/human hybrids) and centaurs (horse/human hybrids) and others. How else to describe a newly discovered creature except in terms of two already familiar creatures? The giraffe was called the "cameleopard" and early illustrators (working from verbal or written accounts) drew it as a cross between a camel and a leopard. Some mythical hybrids came from attempts to describe new discoveries.
Entirely fictional creatures have been invented for fun or created through misunderstanding. Throughout history, humans have invented fanciful creatures made up from of two or more real-life creatures. Marten Cats, Cacoons and Other Impossible Hybrids