Good day everyone, today I present to you Day 20 of the Daily Drawing Challenge, and the theme for today is titled "UNUSUAL". This is a coloured pen drawing of a LIGER
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Reference Photo: Source
When I saw the theme for today, I quickly remember reading about some not so common kind of Species of animals lately. But this particular one cut my eyes. This is actually unusual because, these species are not found in the wild, they are actually the work of men.
WHAT IS A LIGER?
The Liger is a hybrid offspring of a male lion and a female tiger. The liger has parents in the same genus but of different species. The liger is distinct from the similar hybrid called the tigon (hybrid offspring of a male tiger and a female lion), and is the largest of all known extant felines. They enjoy swimming, which is a characteristic of tigers, and are very sociable like lions. Notably, ligers typically grow larger than either parent species, unlike tigons. SOURCE
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HISTORY OF LIGER
The history of lion-tiger hybrids dates to at least the early 19th century in India. In 1798, Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire (1772–1844) made a colour plate of the offspring of a lion and a tiger. The portmanteau "liger" was coined by the 1930s. In 1825, G. B. Whittaker made an engraving of liger cubs born in 1824. The parents and their three liger offspring are also depicted with their trainer in a 19th-century painting in the naïve style. Two liger cubs born in 1837 were exhibited to King William IV and to his successor Queen Victoria. On 14 December 1900 and on 31 May 1901, Carl Hagenbeck wrote to zoologist James Cossar Ewart with details and photographs of ligers born at the Hagenbeck's Tierpark in Hamburg in 1897. SOURCE
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WHAT YOU SHOULD KNOW
- Size: The liger is often believed to represent the largest known cat in the world. Males reach a total length of 3 to 3.6 m (9.8 to 11.8 ft), which means that they rival even large male lions and tigers in length. Imprinted genes may be a factor contributing to the large size of ligers.
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- Longevity: Shasta, a ligress (female liger) was born at the Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City on 14 May 1948 and died in 1972 at age 24. Nook died in 2007, at 21 years old. Hobbs, a male liger at the Sierra Safari Zoo in Reno, Nevada, lived to almost 15 years of age before succumbing to liver failure and weighed 450 kg (992 lb). South Africa has two ligers at its zoo at Bloemfontein. SOURCE
Final Shot
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It's really nice when you learn new things, well, there you have it, my Day 20 of the Daily Drawing Challenge (UNUSUAL). If you want to know more about the Liger click here to visit the source page.