Sheep × Capercaillie

Mammalian Hybrids

EUGENE M. MCCARTHY, PHD GENETICS, ΦΒΚ

Reconstruction of an alleged capercaillie-sheep hybrid, based on the description in the report quoted below (digitally converted by E. M. McCarthy from The Sacrificial Lamb by Josefa de Óbidos).

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Sir, to leave things out of a book, merely because people tell you it will not be believed, is meanness.

—Samuel Johnson

Face of a capercaillie

Note: Any claim that hybrids can actually be produced from this disparate and poorly documented cross would require confirmation from a specimen.

In 1828 the Austrian magazine Jurende’s vaterländischer Pilger (vol. 15, p. 373, #9) reported that a sheep had given birth to a lamb with the face of a Capercaillie. In translation, the report reads as follows:

Recently [i.e., on March 4, 1823], in Klein Neudorf in Prussia, a mother sheep in the herd of Lieutenant Commissar Materne birthed a lamb whose face was very similar to a Capercaillie’s. But in the place of its mouth, it had a two-inch-long conical, wool-covered growth, and, in addition, a smaller such growth on the forehead. Both were connected to the face as with a kind of joint, though no bony matter was present. Beneath the smaller of these growths there was an organ that seemed to stand in place of the eyes, which were absent.^† Beneath the large growth, near the neck, there was a deep hole like a mouth, but without jaws. The ears, which hung down, were securely attached to the sides of the smaller of the two growths and were very large in proportion to the little head. The head as a whole was about the size of the head of a large Capercaillie, to which, in its general form, it was extremely similar.

† The incidence of cyclopia and anophthalmia is significantly elevated in distant hybrids.

The Western Capercaillie (Tetrao urogallus), which is native to the forests of mountainous and boreal regions of much of western Eurasia is the world’s largest grouse. It reaches a maximum weight of about 7.2 kg (16 lb), and so might be large enough to mate with a ewe, especially if she were lying down. However, like other galliform birds, capercaillies lack a phallus and have only a cloaca, which would seem to hamper, though not entirely to preclude, insemination.

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By the same author: Handbook of Avian Hybrids of the World, Oxford University Press (2006).

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