Originally Posted by Neapolitan

I thought the dividing line between one type of animal with another regardless how similar they are to each ofther is the number of chromosomes they possess. And generally I always thought that a species can only reproduce with it's own kind. There is always an exception to every rule e.g. the mule, being an offspring of a donkey and a horse, both being of different speciesfrom each other.

And since I'm following your orders not to look up any information beforehand, I have no way of verifing this but there is another example of a corss-species breeding I want to bring up and that is the "Cabbit," an offspring of a rabbit and a cat. I have no idea if the Cabbit is classified under the rabbit's species or the cat's species or does it share a dual citizenship between both species???

Another mysterious animal that is a result cross-breeding species is the "Camelopardus," which I became fimiliar with oddly enough not through Zooology but through Astronomy. I presume by it's Latinish name, that maybe in the ancient times the ancient Romans cross-bread the leopard with the camel for who knows what reason, but maybe they had a utilitarian purpose for it. By combining the endurance of a camel and the speed of a leopard the ancient Romans found a solution to quickly build their roads in record time using their hybrid animal that had specific qualities build into it that made it more advantageous to use then using a slow stubborn mule that would just hold up progress of said road building projects. All thanks to their scientific knowledge of cross-species breeding. The reason why I brought up the Camelopardus is that while modern scientist are endlessly experimenting with genes of animals (e.g. cloning sheep, cross breeding mules and glow-in-the cats) they've yet to reproduce an hybrid animal from antiquity.

The Cabbit and the Camelopardus throw a monkey wrench in the cog wheels of the machinery of science, when it comes to classification of animals by species. What is a "species" and how should we classify them, and their hybrid-off-spring? What is the critea for classification, and is it worth editting the hundreds of textbooks for the millions of students in the high schools across the United States when the definition is changed. It reminds me of the kind of dilema we had with Pluto's declassification from Planet to Planetoid.