7 Coolest Animal Cross-breeds

Hybrid of: a male leopard and a female lion

The question that must be answered first is: what makes the leopon cooler than the liger? Simple: this hybrid looks like a taxidermist’s joke or what would happen if a child drew a mix of a leopard and a lion. The leopon has a head basically identical to a lion (though with spots) but the rest of its body looks the same as a leopard. It’s like if someone stuck the head of one animal on the body of another and called it a day.

Usually nature isn’t that literal with its cross-breeds, so the leopon is a very rare case indeed. They have been first recorded around 1910 and bred since then in a couple of countries like Japan or Germany.

What makes the leopon more amazing is that most female lions are overwhelmingly larger than a male leopard, so the very idea of them getting it on seems pretty preposterous. Presumably the lioness’ drinking water was spiked with rum beforehand.

VIDEO

Hybrid of: a zebra and a donkey

Somewhere in Africa a man looked at a zebra, with its majestic beauty and those mesmerizing stripes, not knowing if the animal is white with black stripes or black with white stripes… The confusion which it must have caused him sent the man into a fury and he decided to humiliate the animal by crossing it with nature’s butt-monkey, the donkey.

The result of that was the zonkey, which resembles either a really dirty zebra or a donkey in zebra-pattern high heels, making the male zonkeys the animal equivalent of drag queens. And that’s what’s so cool about them – this species’ cross-breeds look like cross-dressers, a cruel play on words and nature the likes of which could only be more hilarious of someone combines the zonkey with a peacock.

VIDEO

Fusion of: animal and plant

The green sea slug Elysia chlorotica is one of the biggest thieves underwater. For years it has been known to steal photosynthesizing organelle and genes from algae, its primary food source, but now scientists believe the little plagiarist found a way to re-wire its own body to produce chlorophyll, the naturally occurring plant pigment, responsible for their, and now the slug’s, green coloring.

We are talking about a fairly complex chemical process of chlorophyll production going on inside an animal’s body, something researchers thought impossible until now. The slug can very well be the first actual fusion of animal and plant on the planet.

And you know what this means: as soon as scientists crack how the hell did this happen, we will be one step closer to what humanity always dreamed of: real life Ents; the sentient humanoid-ish trees from Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings which stirred some serious trouble for the evil wizard Saruman. Come on science! We want Ents!

VIDEO

Written by Cezary Jan Strusiewicz – Copyrighted © www.weirdworm.com Image Sources