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Has/is there ever been a creature that reproduces with creatures of another species?
(literature.cafe)
this post was submitted on 26 May 2026
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Humans did. There was regular crossbreeding producing hybrids between Homo sapiens and Neanderthals.
Other species can produce hybrids, but i dont know of any that do so regularly
Not like that. I mean of completely different kind.
“Kind” is a meaningless word here.
Humans (Sapiens) were a different species of Homo than Neanderthals (Neanderthalensis); both are in the genus Homo.
Thus: Homo Sapiens and Homo Neanderthalensis.
This is exactly like lions (Leo) and tigers (Tigris) being different species, but in the same genus (Panthera).
Thus: Panthera Leo and Panthera Tigris.
And just like with lions and tigers, offspring are often either infertile or only fertile in one direction – IIRC, human/neanderthal couplings only produced fertile offspring if the human was female and the neanderthal male (we can see this in our own DNA).
Just to point out kind is frequently used by proponents of devine/intelligent design pseudoscience to muddy the waters in arguing established biology because terms like species or clade etc refutes their biblical arguments. Not saying that this is what the poster belongs to, it could just be a knowledge gap.
Yes exactly, thanks.
And something many of them can’t understand is that ‘species’ is a very fluid thing. There are no clear boundaries, and it’s just a term we use to wrap our heads round things.
Like with chickens and eggs, there was never a single point where an avian dinosaur gave birth to a bird – it’s not a clear delineation. Something mostly an avian theropod gave birth to something slightly more bird, and this happened over and over, with the slightly more accumulating for millions of years, and you finally get ‘bird’. But there’s no way to point at one generation and say ‘see, it’s now a bird’.
The process is so gradual, you could never point at a thing and say This Is Where Speciation Happened. It doesn’t work that way. Just like you can’t point to a drop of water in the ocean and say This Is Where The Wave Started.
Care to elaborate?
Interspecies breeding is pretty straightforward. The species have to be very closely related to produce viable offspring.
I'm not aware of any such example. I'm not an expert, so could be wrong and the terminology in the following could wrong, but just to give you an idea:
If the species are genetically too different, it can already be a problem that the reproduction organs don't match. For example, human sperm can't even try to inseminate a chicken egg, because the egg shell simply blocks it.
This is a fairly obvious example, but even at microscopic scale, the sperm may not be compatible with the egg cell.
Then you've got the problem that the DNA needs to be combined in some fashion. If you've got a different number of chromosomes, that will cause problems.
But even if a successful insemination were to take place and a fetus develops, there's a very high chance that the gene combination of e.g. a human and a chicken just does not develop into something that can survive. It might have a chicken heart in a human-sized body and just can't pump enough blood to survive. All kinds of things like that can go wrong.
In general, nature is messy. It does not care about our definition of a species. But yeah, the chance of inter-species offspring is just very low when the species are very different.
While this doesn't change the viability of humans fertilizing chickens, chicken sperms doesn't have some special ability to penetrate the egg shell, the shell is formed well after the egg is fertilized.
Ah, that does make a lot of sense, yeah. Thanks!
Define kind.