Worldbuilding Wednesday 3/25/20: Big Cat Hybrids

A pair of jaglions (Jaguar x lion hybrids.) The darker one surprised the breeder with its black coat, but jaguars are known to carry a melanistic gene.

As I demonstrated last Wednesday, it’s pretty easy to come up with a name for a novel species of carnivorous mammal.

Now let’s turn to the feline world, and the naming conventions of big cat hybrids. The “big four” Panthera species (lions, tigers, leopards, and jaguars) are all capable of interbreeding with each other, as well as with pumas. Smaller cats, like the serval, ocelot, and bobcat, also hybridize, even with felis catus, the domestic cat – this has led to the rise of several new domestic cat breeds, like the Bengal with its spangled coat. Surprisingly, there is no scientifically accepted way of naming these hybrids, at least not yet. Breeders mostly wing it. One convention is to combine the first syllable of the male feline’s name with the last syllable of the female’s name, thus creating the well-publicized liger (male lion, female tiger) and tigon (male tiger, female lion.) This usually serves, except when it doesn’t. The jaguar-lion hybrids in the above photo were named jaglions by their owners, and another jaguar hybrid was called the jagulep (jaguar x leopard cross.)

But, in my own randomly generated world, I am going to adhere to the liger convention of naming, for the most part, and also assume that all feline species are capable of interbreeding and producing viable offspring. Here’s a list of feline species if you don’t recognize some of the names. I used both puma and cougar to the refer to the same animal. Because leopard and cat are the second part of many smaller cats’ names, which adds confusion, for these the first name refers to both male and female. Oh, and for snow leopards, snow serves as the first part, for the male, but uncia — the species name — for the second female part.

Big Cat Hybrids