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Are lions and tigers both cats in the same way Border Collies and German Shorthair Pointers are both dogs? Or are there more significant differences?
by TheSpiceIsLife 7y ago
Are lions and tigers both cats in the same way Border Collies and German Shorthair Pointers are both dogs?
Or are there more significant differences?
- pojzon 7y agoI would say your "dogs" example still represent the same spieces but different race. Those dogs can breed normal offsprings. Lions/tigers cannot.
- TheSpiceIsLife 7y agoOh yes, now I’ve read the Wikipedia articles, it seems Ligers and Tigons tend toward weak offspring prone to cancer.
- barry-cotter 7y agoThat depends entirely on what “the same way” means. Lions’ and tigers’ last common ancestor was well over a million years ago. Pathera’s last common ancestor was 6.6mya. European derived dogs probably had a common ancestor within the last thousand years, definitely the last five thousand. Dogs are fully interfertile, Panthera are mostly interfertile, more than horses, zebras and donkeys are, for example. It might be possible to get zebra ancestry into donkeys’ or lions’ gene pools but there’s no might about lions and tigers. It could be done, and similarly divergent Felidae have mostly domestic cat breeds with substantial non housecat ancestry, like Bengals. Tigers’ and lions’ behaviour and morphology are very different but the same could be said for greyhounds and bloodhounds, or Great Danes and Chihuahuas. You can’t really answer the question without specifying how you’re comparing them.
- masklinn 7y ago> Or are there more significant differences? They're completely different cats. Panthera leo and Panthera tigris split about 7MYA (est.).