In 1938, Edgar Anderson and Leslie Hubricht laid out the idea of introgression to describe the hybridization of species of herbaceous perennial wildflowers of the Tradescantia genus. Hybridization’s benefits are not a new ideaĪs far back as the 1930s, botanists realized that hybridization plays a role in the evolution of plant species. Snowshoe Hares Borrow from Black-Tailed Jackrabbits “We’re beginning to realize that hybridization exists in the evolutionary history of many organisms we didn’t expect it to, including Homo sapiens,” Scott Taylor, an evolutionary ecologist at the University of Colorado Boulder, tells The Scientist. They are not evolutionary dead-ends, and in some cases, may serve as evolutionary accelerators. If the hybrids can’t reproduce, they would seem to be irrelevant evolutionarily, but studies of the narluga and other naturally occurring hybrids have begun to hint that such offspring may not be the biological misfits they were once thought to be. That notion challenges naturalists’ traditional view of hybrids as the result of maladaptive crossings, such as when a female horse mates with a male donkey and gives birth to a sterile mule. In fact, they are common enough that natives of western Greenland have a word for the narwhal-beluga hybrid, itorsaq.īecause several narlugas have been spotted before, researchers suspect that the creatures may be fertile, and that some narlugas may be the product of two narluga parents rather than one beluga and one narwhal. The hunter said he’d seen it with two other similar-looking whale creatures, and he, apparently, isn’t the only one to have seen a narluga. The skull, it turned out, was the first-ever confirmed narluga, the son of a beluga dad and a narwhal mom.Ī deeper dive into the history of the skull (it had been found fixed atop a hunter’s home) revealed that this animal may not have been the only one of its kind. Working with a team of collaborators, she extracted genetic material and compared it with DNA from the teeth of narwhal and beluga specimens in the museum. When Lorenzen became director of the museum in 2015, she decided to examine the skull more closely. But the 30-year-old specimen, hidden away in the basement of the Natural History Museum of Denmark at the University of Copenhagen, didn’t have a tusk at all. Of the 18 chompers lining the front of the skull’s mouth, some were twisted, not unlike a narwhal’s tusk. The whale’s teeth were what had caught molecular ecologist Eline Lorenzen’s attention. The discovery is considered the earliest example of hybrid animal breeding.This liger cub and other hybrid animals were thought to be biological rarities, but recent studies have revealed cross-species animals are more common than once thought. Researchers were able to discover that the kunga was a mix between a female donkey and a male Syrian wild ass by analyzing the bones of kungas that had been buried in an elite burial complex in Tell Umm el-Marra in northern Syria.

Add Changing America to your Facebook or Twitter feed to stay on top of the news.Īrchaeologists have long assumed the animals were a mix of a donkey with another animal, since horses didn’t appear in the area until 4,000 years ago, but have had little evidence to prove it until now.Ī team of archeologists, geneticists and paleontologists used DNA sequencing to finally solve the long-standing mystery of the kunga’s genetic makeup, according to a recently published study in Science Advances. Our country is in a historic fight against the coronavirus. The animals were considered a status symbol in ancient Mesopotamia, with archaeologists finding references of the animals being given as dowries in royal marriages and costing six times as much as a donkey in cuneiform tablets from Syro-Mesopotamia.

Scientists recently discovered an ancient Mesopotamian animal known as a “kunga” that was a cross between a donkey and a wild ass - and is the oldest known human-bred hybrid.īefore horses arrived in the area, large male kungas were used to pull war wagons, while smaller one were used for agricultural purposes like pulling ploughs. Kungas held a high status in ancient Mesopotamia for about 500 years until horses were introduced to the area 4,000 years ago.The animal was a cross between a female donkey and a male Syrian wild ass and was used to pull war chariots, transport royalty and help with agricultural work.A team of researchers recently discovered the kunga as the earliest example of human animal hybrid breeding.

Hybrid animals