I know that Ligers are Napoleon Dynamite's favorite animal, but I didn't think they were real.
Apparently they are. One of them is on display at a Siberian zoo. Its father was a lion. Its mother was a tiger:
"This was not the result of a scientific experiment," RIA Novosti quoted zoo director Rostislav Shilo as saying at the time. "It's just that the lion and the tiger live in neighboring caves in the Novosibirsk zoo, and got used to each other. It's practically impossible in the wild."
Comments
Who is Napoleon Dynamite?
But yeah, the people in Canberra say they're really rare too and only come from lions and tigers being kept in close proximity in captivity. Very cute though 😊
http://www.zooquarium.com.au/cats.htm
Its completely impossible in the wild, as to my knowledge the two species do not have an overlapping geographic range of occurrence. I do know the most eastern occurrence of lion is in the extreme west of India, but that is not tiger country yet I believe. They have different habitats too.
Many male lions can impregnate a female lion, so they have hormones that make their own baby grow bigger and bigger, so that their's will be the one that's born. To counter-act this, the female lion has hormones that stunt the growth of a baby, so that they won't grow too big and kill her while she's giving birth
A tiger is different. Only one male can make a female pregnant and they don't have those hormones. So when a male lion impregnates a female tiger, the baby will be born huge, much bigger than a regular lion, because there's nothing to stunt it's growth. When a female lion gets pregnant by a male tiger, the baby will be smaller than both it's mother and father, because of the hormones in the mother. That's the difference between a liger and a tigon.
It's not a new phenomenon. I first read of "Ligers" and "Tigons" when I was in elementary school-- which, as faithful readers of MoH know, was several hundred years ago.
http://www.hoglezoo.org/about/zoo.history.php
1948
Female liger is born May 14. Father a lion, mother a Bengal tiger. Named "Shasta" because 'she hasta' have this and 'she hasta' have that. Shasta died in 1972 of old age. Her taxidermy mount is now exhibited at the Monte L. Bean Life Sciences Museum at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah
how beatiful what the animal kingdom reserves for us in the cat family
I know this because we never used dynamite.
I live in northern Idaho (it's much, much prettier, IMHO). When the movie came out on DVD, you couldn't find it in stores here (it just flew off the shelves).
http://www.sierrasafarizoo.com/animals/liger.htm
Oh no! Alex, you 'idiate', now you're in trouble!