Zorse : horse with zebra stripes

Well, is it a horse with zebra stripes or a zebra with missing stripes? Both are true in the case of Eclypse. Italian stallion zebra and a German female horse married and were surprised to give birth of this beautiful zorse.

Last year the mother of the zorse was taken from her German safari park home to visit a ranch in Italy, where she was left to roam freely with a number of other zebras, when one, Ullysses took a shine to her.

Now Eclypse is a major attraction at her home safari park at Schloss Holte-Stukenbrock, near the German border with Holland. Hybrids are not easy to create, however. The mating pair’s different number of chromosomes – the “packets” of DNA in each cell – makes a pregnancy hard to achieve.

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A horse has 64 chromosomes; the zebra has 44. The zorse that results from cross-breeding will have a number of chromosomes that is somewhere in between.

“The smaller number of chromosomes has to be on the male side,” said Lesley Barwise-Munro, a veterinary surgeon in Alnwick, Northumberland, and a spokeswoman for the British Equine Veterinary Association.

“If it had been the other way around there would have been no pregnancy. It’s how nature works.” And hybrids were invariably sterile. (crazy news)