I saw a sprightly older man, thin, but wiry with two leashes on the street. One held shortly was a huge dog with head shaped like brick, but larger who reached up almost to the man's armpit. It was hairless.
On the other side on a longer leash, and coming along slowly because it was investigating, perhaps was a pile of fur that perhaps reached the man's ankle. Two dogs about as far apart as its possible to be for the dog kind.
The incongruity of it made me want to laugh.
One thing we can do in our worlds is change out the details of pets. Eire with Chihuahua (not that the hairless yappers would survive in the cold) is a different place than the one with Irish Wolfhounds.
Another thing is we can create new species from sub-parts of the baramin or kind. Coywolfs and dogwolfs and so on are possible with our genetics. Ligers, a cross between tigers and lions are also. What of a Cheetah spotted lion?
Staying with Earth genetics, and not introducing oddities from the far reaches of alien genes, we could rewrite the Earths genetic variations.
1. Bears are probably all the same kind. So why is it that Kodiaks are the largest and brown not so much? Probably amount of food plays a large role, and the fact that the larger creature is more efficient at storing heat against the cold. But we could flip this around easily enough. Make Polar bears tiny, and the Brown bears of the now flush with game Appalachians the true giants of the hemisphere.
2. I suspect that Bobcats and House Cats could mate. You could send a verser up against a thieving, hairless, Siamese eye and Siamese smart, bob-tailed cat eager to steal his food as he sleeps by the campfire at night. Even weirder if his house cat (and cats are carried by a surprising number of versers) wants to get into a cat fight with it, or um, mate.
3. Fresh-water and saltwater crocs and alligators. One guy ran an experiment with some fresh-water fish. He kept adding salt to their aquarium over a two week span until it was as salty as the ocean. The fish adapted. He changed it back all at once to fresh-water. They died.
Its almost certain in my view that crocs and gators are the same baramin.
An interesting point with such creatures is that they don't stop growing. Give them enough food (say a lush continent that has not had its fish and birds hunted nearly to extinction) and enough space and make it so that there is not a higher ranked predator like a Giant Roc or Terracuyl the Crimson, ancient red dragon, and these things could get forty and fifty feet long.
Toss in that the local earth is good Alabama red clay, and you might see a fifty foot long red-tinted supercroc deciding to visit the campfire of a verser in the swamp. Or if the verser is camping on the beach, his fire might draw in a curious croc from the ocean. After eating a few sharks, he's still feeling a mite hungry...
4. We've all seen black, calico, orange, and white cats. I'm sure that a verser would be divided between the urge to panic and the urge to laugh out loud if he saw a calico lion.
5. Wholfins. The cross between dolphin and whale shark? This might give an excuse to run a scenario where a shark comes by, and the swimming verser panics, only to find out that the shark is trying to help him.
I've been told that it's actually impossible to imagine something that doesn't exist. You can imagine variations on things that already exist, but it's completely impossible to imagine something that absolutely does not exist. Just thought that was pertinent.
Wholphins (sometimes called wholfins) aren't related to whale sharks.
Try dolphin and killer whale as the parents.
And I would seriously doubt that an alligator/crocodile union would produce offspring in real life. They may look the same on the outside, but they just aren't that closely related. That's like expecting a garter snake and a glass lizard to be able to have children together just because they are both legless reptiles.
I read about a guy that mated horses with zebras. Results, striped horses. The same guy mated guinea pigs and rabbits. Can't remember his name though.....
(Doing Therapy)
Horse/zebra hybrids aren't uncommon. The main problem with producing them is the mother's immune system; it's especially strong in horses and their kin.
A rabbit/cavy (guinea pig) I would seriously doubt is possible in real life, outside of a petri dish.
Thanks, Nodwick. I know a little bit about biology (more than the average joe, but not really that much.)
A1, its what I've done for world design at times. Mix and match.
Nodwick,
Not all of foxes, wolves, coyotes, and dogs can mate with each other, but I think they can mate with someone who can mate with someone who can ....A with B and D, and B with C and A....which would make A connected to C but with one interlink between. I'd be curious about crocs and gators...they might be one interlink away from mating with each other.
I'd been taught that saltwater and freshwater was a pretty hard and fast distinction, but evidently too this guy's experiment its more of a warning/ go slow line than anything else.
A rabbit/cavy (guinea pig) I would seriously doubt is possible in real life, outside of a petri dish.
It was all done by artificial insemination.
(Doing Therapy)
And of course, I was pretty impressed by Alton Brown's cooking show where he revealed that Kale, Cabbage, Broccoli, Cauliflower?, Brussel Sprouts, and at least one other were all the same plant way back when Cain said 'I'll think I'll stick this seed in the ground and see what happens.' and then 'Wow, I'm good. Way better than my stupid brother, Abel.'
Which just goes to show that vegetarianism is bad for the brain. :)
Well, the major barrier I see for hybridizing foxes is that they have a different chromosome number than dogs, wolves, jackels, and coyotes do. You might get a first generation hybrid, but not grandkids like you could with wolf/dog, /jackel/dog, wolf/coyote, etc. Or like you can get with leopard/lion (some of those hybrids are fertile) or in rare cases from a hinny.
As far as the cabbage family veggies go, kale is the closest to the original wild type. The rest are all bred by humans from it, emphasizing some trait or another that the farmer preferred. Cabbages have a greatly enlarged apical bud, for instance, while Brussels Sprouts have enlarged, tightly closed side buds, and kohlrabi has an expanded, enlarged stem. Breeding of dogs works in a similar fashion; the breeder selects for specific traits and mates the dogs with more of those traits, slowly producing a new breed. Because dogs change so much in the course of development from puppy to adult, they are much more flexible for breeding differences in that developmental pattern than a species who don't change very much as they mature (such as cats). Still, the potential for distinctive breeds is present in almost every species on Earth (cheetahs being the only mammalian exception I can think of, and even there you could hybridize them with related cats).
If you're talking genetics, someone just asked me why it was (as it apparently is) that lions and tigers are the only cat species that can be crossed. There is the detail that they do not share habitat, and so the fact that they can cross has never led to the lost of distinct speciation there; but they are not the only cats which do. In any case, while your other feline crosses make good fiction, let me warn you against attempting to claim they're possible in our world.
The other reason for polar bears to be big is that they are predatory carnivores in a location where all the prey is also big. Arctic wolves can afford to be smaller because they can hunt in packs (although now that I mention it, I don't know whether they do), but an arctic bear has to be powerful enough to grab a seal in the water or go toe-to-toe with a sea lion if he's going to eat. So if you make them smaller, you're going to have to figure out what they hunt.
We have giant alligators in The Playground, based on exactly that point: if nothing hunts them, and they can find food, they keep growing.
Another note on cats: if you see a three-colored cat, it's female. Males cannot have more than two colors in their genome. So your calico lion would probably have to be a lioness.
John: that thing about not being able to imagine something that does not exist was first suggested by empiricist philosopher David Hume. He was wrong. Find out why by reading Game Ideas Unlimited: Empiricism. I'm sorry that Jim's great illustration of the description of a giraffe was lost in the transfer to the new server, but that gives people a reason to buy the book.
The problem with breeding cheetah breeds is that the gene pool is too narrow--that is, all cheetahs are so close to each other genetically that it is not possible to identify specific individual distinguishing traits for which you can breed. This is considered a threat to the survival of the species, as it is unlikely that any cheetah would survive a disease that afflicted cheetahs, they being all so similar genetically.
--M. J. Young
Close, but not quite, M.J. A male cat can have three colors in two circumstances. One, if the third color is only on the belly (such as white), as belly fur is separate from the rest of the feline skin in how it is genetically determined. Second, if said tom cat has one or more extra X chromosomes, as the genes responsible for calico-style coloration are on the X, and having multiple Xs is what enables them to operate.
Also, Arctic wolves, like most other wolves, will consume large quantities of mice and similar burrowing animals that the larger polar bear has no interest in.
Quite a few of the larger cats can be cross-bred successfully in captivity, but again, there are barriers to such reproduction in the wild. The liger is merely the hybrid most commonly mentioned in the media (and there was a period in the early 20th century when the tigon was similarly well-known, while the liger was almost unheard of). How many people have heard of the lijagulep, for example?
There are small cat hybrids, such as the Savannah breeds, but they aren't as striking in appearance as the big cats.
Thanks for that info, Nodwick. I'm passing it on to others.
--M. J. Young
If some sort of feedback loop got going which favored smaller polar bears, I could see these smaller bears being direct competition with the wolves for the mice.
I've heard that smaller bears will flip over rocks and tree trunks to get at insects. So it might be just an economy of size thing. It makes no sense for the polar bear to use his vast strength to get so little payback for his effort.
I would suspect some form of genetic degeneration (of which what happened to the cheetah being an example of how such a thing could come to be. Forex, what if the only survivors in an area of some natural disaster was a victim of unfortunate genetics? If the only surviving breeding pairs of cheetahs had been albinos, then all cheetah now would be albino. Or if all the breeding pairs had been Triple X on the male side, it wold have had some effect. My biology is not good enough to guess what exactly.) as to why true breeding hybrids of certain types don't last.
I've also heard that while wolves can mate with coyotes they prefer their own species. Species, of course, being one of those terms without an accepted definition (or so I learned in school. I think there was six to eight definitions.)
MJ,
A ways back, when I was running Marvel Superheroes, the kickboxer pointed out that with Pre-Columbian America you had space for very large hunting grounds, and no superior predators, and he thought the current suggestions on max size for alligators were incorrect. Once the gator got past a certain size, there was no way arrow armed Seminoles were going to hunt it. It stuck with me, and I've used that thought a number of times. It made its way into Dragonhunt where the top predator is an intelligent dragon who makes themself overlord of a bunch of sapient races in their Hunt or Hunting Grounds. Its a five hundred to six hundred mile circle in which no other dragons are permitted, and any challenge to the dragon in question is put down with ruthless intelligence.
You're quite correct regarding the bear sizes and the reward vs. effort in catching prey.
I would still suspect that the insects the smaller bears hunt in that fashion are social, such as termites and ants, thus providing more food for the same amount of effort. Swarming grubs could also qualify as an abundant food source found in rotting logs.
If all the surviving cheetahs had been albino, yes, the species would either have survived as albinos or not at all, until a fresh mutation re-introduced the ability to manufacture pigment. However, if all surviving males had been "triple X" as you put it, the species would probably have died out in 2-3 generations anyway, thanks to the problems of meiotic division when there are an odd number of chromosomes, at least in animals (plants deal with that a bit more effectively). As it is, cheetahs are still in a severe genetic bottleneck, with all members of the species as closely related as full-blooded brothers and sisters thanks to enforced inbreeding.
I rather like your dragon idea there.
"Temple of the Dying Sun" for D20 on Lulu.com and Rpg.now...:)
I have a few biological ideas in my works. In 'Land of Lislan' I wanted to make a very high powered D&D party, and have a good reason for them to work together. So I made them the Royal Family of their country (or most of them). But every D20 game wants people of different races...so Dear Old Dad, the King, was human, but in good historical King fashion, he had lots of, err, wives. In this case of differing species. So the half-elf is half-brother to the half-halfling...
And the lead villainess in the game is the Step-mom Succubus.
More biological was the idea for alien plants near the galactic center (with a dozen suns in the sky). We store our energy in ATP. They stored their energy in longer, more explosive molecules.
Ya know, something just occurred to me. We wouldn't be talking about earth, so we wouldn't be talking about earth biology. In other words, the wolf and the cheetah mate with each other on a regular basis. These are highly sought after as guard animals because if the fearsome barking doesn't scare the bad guy away, the animal can run them down at over 60 MPH.....
It seems that in D20, humans are the genetic version of the universal solvent, water. In other words, anything and everything can mate with a human in that game system and produce fertile offspring. While if the demihuman races (plus the goblinoids such as orcs) are collectively considered to be a ring species, that could work out (with humans the one population that is reproductively compatible with every other population), it fails miserably when it is noted that humans can and do have children by things as diverse as slaadi (Lovecraftian frogs), dragons (hexapodal reptiles), vampires (formerly deceased corpses), illumians (walking languages), trolls (carnivorous free-living cancer?), archons (angels), and of course, succubi (demons).
While I have no trouble envisioning life with great differences from Earth's chemically... why did these plants use longer, explosive molecules? That sounds a bit like Hal Clement's "The Nitrogen Fix," wherein the genetically unstable nitrolife plants were prone to detonate if hit hard.
John,
Its somewhat a matter of where do you think its cool to set up the boundary lines for the game? I chose Earth genetics. In other words, in the nigh infinite Multiverse, you have that small subset of worlds that are pretty close to our Earth at least genetically.
Nodwick,
Some of those joinings should require magic. I could argue that a shapechanged dragon is changed all the way down to his genetics. Or I could argue that he is like the Galapagos finch in a way. The finch has the ability to pass on to its offspring the decision to have a long beak or a short beak...one is better for the various types of seeds that you have in a dry or wet set of years. So, a dragon's genetics are capable of modifying themselves to deal with the much simpler genetics of a human.
Jerry Pournelle says that civilizations always go toward the more dense energy source. And I'm sure I picked up the idea from some place. And some of my plants will detonate themselves if you try to take their shade.