Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by Blahah 4455 days ago
Species don't necessarily have to be that closely related to hybridize. Compatibility is usually more complex but sometimes surprisingly more crude (when related simply to chromosome number) than a linear scaling with evolutionary time. Goats and Sheep are both in family Bovidae subfamily Caprinae. The species diverged around 7 million years ago [0]. Intra-familial (but inter-generic) hybrids are fairly well-known (savannah cats, zedonks, etc.).

Much more surprising is that people have reportedly successfully created hybrids [1] between chickens (family Phasianidae) and guinea fowl (family Numididae), which diverged around 50 million years ago [2].

Note that http://timetree.org is a beautiful service for finding out how closely related two species are (in evolutionary time).

[0] http://www.timetree.org/index.php?taxon_a=Ovis+aries&taxon_b...

[1] http://biology.stackexchange.com/questions/2592/is-sexual-re...

[2] http://www.timetree.org/index.php?taxon_a=Gallus+gallus&taxo...