Related Questions
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- From evolution, do humans still retain the (now probably unconscious) ability to detect pheremones and learn things
- can future parents decide what gender they want their baby to be and if so how?
A dog and a cat cannot have a baby together because they are too genetically different. Inside each of our cells our DNA is packed into little strands called chromosomes. All humans (normally) have 46 chromosomes (some disorders occur because a person has extra chromosomes, or is missing some). Dogs have 78 chromosomes and cats have 38.
Different species cannot breed together because the chromosomes won’t match up and the egg ad sperm will not recognise each other and combine to create a baby. However, there are a couple of examples where different species can breed together because they are very closely related, or genetically similar. Eg. A male donkey and a female horse can create a mule. The mule will be sterile though and can never have babies.
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Aimee’s right. Dogs and cats are different species. One of the ways scientists figure out whether animals are from the same “species” is if they can breed together and produce fertile offspring (i.e. their babies will also be able to breed when they are old enough). Animals from different species generally won’t breed together successfully.
If the species are closely related, they may be able to have a baby, but the baby will be infertile (it won’t be able to have it’s own babies later on in life). Like Aimee said, this is what happens when a donkey and a horse breed with each other. The offspring, called a mule, is infertile.
You may be too young to remember this, but when I was a kid there was a cartoon called CatDog – it’s not real but it’s what the baby of a dog and cat might look like (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CatDog)
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Aimee and Bridget have totally nailed this one. They’ve mentioned the solid science reasons why this won’t happen. Ghostbusters suggested this might happen, though, at the end of the world (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O3ZOKDmorj0) but this is a *movie about science* not *science itself*…
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Aimee and Bridget are completely right with this. It’s just not possible but there was an entire cartoon based on a CatDog creature. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YCinDf4Jmo
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Nothing to add to Aimee’s and Bridget’s responses.
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