March 17, 2005
Ligers, and Tions..and Bears oh my
I love the movie Napoleon Dynamite. It is hysterical. A few weeks ago Adam and I were talking about the movie and quoting some lines from it over IM, and something really cool happened.
We both use the newest version of Trillian (which rox) instead of AOL or Yahoo (which suck) which includes links within the IM windows to the Wikipedia dictionary. As we typed the word "Liger" the word popped up as underlined with the Wikipedia dicitonary link. (These popup boxes come up as a javascript overlib box and are totally sweet).
We expected to see an entry about the movie, and Napoleon Dynamite saying something sweet like "It's probably my favorite animal, bred mainly for it's skills and magic"
Instead we found this entry. Which also then led us to this one.
As it turns out, a Liger is a real animal. It is a cross breed between a lion and a tiger:
The liger is a cross between a male lion and a female tiger. It is therefore a member of genus Panthera. It looks like a giant lion, with diffused tiger stripes. Like tigers (and unlike lions), ligers like swimming.
A tigon is the cross between a male tiger and a female lion.
Known ligers exist due to human influence, either by deliberate human intervention, or by humans putting lions and tigers in enclosed spaces together. In natural conditions tigers and lions generally do not inhabit the same territory - the two species coexist in the wild today only in the Gir forest of India although their respective ranges used to intersect in Persia, China and perhaps also Beringia. Even where they do coexist, there have been no confirmed reports of interbreeding, though there are long-standing claims that this has happened.
Ligers grow much larger than tigers or lions. This is because female lions and male tigers transmit a growth-inhibiting gene to their descendants. Being the offspring of a male lion and female tiger, the liger does not have the growth-inhibiting gene and grows much more. They will grow constantly through their lifespan until their bodies can no longer sustain their size
Who'da thunk? Really cool stuff. Now we find ourselves writing nonsense phrases and words back and forth to each other just to see if they show up!
Comments
I don't believe this! You're making this up.
I soooooo totally am not! Check out the links!
...but then my world might end!