Longest-lived liger

A liger is a hybrid big cat resulting from a successful mating between a lion Panthera leo and a tigress P. tigris. The longest-lived liger was a female specimen named Shasta, who was born on 6 May 1948 at Hogle Zoo in Salt Lake City, Utah, USA, and died on 19 July 1972, at the age of 24 years and 74 days. She was the first liger seen in America, and her parents were a lion called Huey and a tigress called Daisy, who had been raised together, explaining why they mated. Normally, lions and tigers are aggressive towards each other in captivity, and their geographical distributions in the wild scarcely overlap, so they do not occur there. Shasta is now preserved as a taxiderm exhibit at the Monte L. Bean Life Science Museum at Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, USA, and features in displays and talks concerning hybridisation.

If successful, the reverse cross, i.e., a mating between a tiger and a lioness, yields a hybrid big cat known as a tigon. Both ligers and tigons combine features from both parental species, such as a mane (if the hybrid offspring is male) from the lion parent and stripes from the tiger parent, but whereas tigons are no larger than their parents, ligers can grow much larger than both parents, with the largest big cat alive today being a liger. Some female ligers and tigons have been fertile, and when mated to either a lion or a tiger have given birth to second-generation hybrid big cat cubs, but male ligers and tigons are normally sterile.