> “I’m still confused. My jaw is still on the floor,” said Prosanta Chakrabarty, an ichthyologist at Louisiana State University and the curator of fishes at its Museum of Natural Science. “It’s like if they had a cow and a giraffe make a baby.” Then he quickly corrected himself, because the lineages of those two ruminants split only a few dozen million years ago. The evolutionary paths of paddlefish and sturgeons diverged 184 million years ago. For those fish to breed is more like “if a human came out of a platypus egg,” he said.<p>- From <a href="https://www.quantamagazine.org/extra-dna-may-make-unlikely-hybrid-fish-possible-20200805/" rel="nofollow noreferrer">https://www.quantamagazine.org/extra-dna-may-make-unlikely-h...</a>
>Both the American paddlefish and the Russian sturgeon are endangered species.[2]<p>This is where I started getting suspicious about how accurate the article was. The paddlefish is vulnerable, but not endangered. They're doing pretty well in the Missouri, all things considered.<p>>Researchers in Hungary conducted experiments designed to test if either species could be bred in captivity.<p>This is where the wiki lost me. Paddlefish are relatively easy to produce in captivity. We've been doing it for decades. It generally doesn't involve sperm from an unrelated species either. I'm curious what the real story is.
The genetics researcher that claimed humans are pig-monkey hybrids is a professor at UGA. His website has some wild examples of real and possible hybrids: <a href="http://www.macroevolution.net/about-me.html" rel="nofollow noreferrer">http://www.macroevolution.net/about-me.html</a>
Russian sturgeon is endangered species, because it's hands down the most delicious fish in the world. Especially when grilled or hot-smoked. It is truly in a class of its own, well above the rest. Add to that being the source of the caviar and it will get you eaten to extinction.