Sturddlefish go shockingly far beyond classic crossbreeds like mules and ligers, whose parent species sit close together on the tree of life. Sturddlefish result from the merger of different taxonomic families. It’s like if they had a cow and a giraffe make a baby. Then he quickly corrected himself, because the lineages of those 2 ruminants split only 40 ma ago. The evolutionary paths of paddlefish and sturgeons diverged 184 ma ago. For those fish to breed is more like if a human came out of a platypus egg.

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