Turtle-cow Hybrids?

Mammalian Hybrids

EUGENE M. MCCARTHY, PHD GENETICS, ΦΒΚ

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A diligent scholar is like a bee who takes honey from many different flowers and stores it in his hive.

—John Amos Comenius

Any claim that hybrids can be produced from this highly disparate cross would require confirmation.

This cross has been only very rarely reported. It is however, similar to turtle × sheep, which has also been reported. Another cross, which also seems similar, and which has been reported a few times, is turtle × human

Two turtle-cow hybrids were reported on page 3, columns 4 and 5, of the October 28, 1902, issue of the Evening Times-Republican, a newspaper published in Marshalltown, Iowa (source). The following is a transcript of the report:

A Freak Cow

Special to the Times-Republica.
Waterloo, Oct. 28.—Circus men and museum managers will be after a cow owned by Nicholas Apple, east of Gilbertsville, when her wonderful freak-bearing record is made public. A year ago she gave birth to a calf bearing a mud turtle’s head. The calf was dead, and while it was looked upon as a strange freak of nature no mention was made of the fact beyond the neighborhood. She has now given birth to a second calf more wonderful than the other. The head is precisely that of a turtle, and, stranger still, the back is covered with the same horny shell that grows on a turtle. The calf was dead as in the case of the first, but the skin, head and hoofs were saved and will be placed in some museum.

Another turtle-cow hybrid, also birthed in Iowa, was reported on the front page, column 1, of the August 10, 1908, issue of the Waterbury Evening Democrat, a newspaper published in Waterbury, Connecticut (source):

Calf Born Like Turtle

Had Skin of Shell Instead of Hair and Tapering Tail

Eldora, Ia., Aug. 10.—At the home of William Cockburn, in Cherokee County, there has been born a freak calf. The covering of the body, instead of being of hair, is of hard shell like that of a mud turtle. It is the owner’s belief that the mother cow had been frightened or perhaps bitten by a mud turtle in the river which runs through his farm.
The tail of the calf was a perfectly-formed turtle’s tail, being six inches long and tapering to a point. A. J. Anderson, a taxidermist, says the internal arrangement of the calf resembled those of a turtle.

Related: turtle × sheep >>

Sheep-pig hybrids?

Table of contents >>

Bibliography >>

Biology Dictionary >>

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

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