How come alligators and crocodiles can’t make viable offspring? Isn’t the only difference between the two the snout?
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Reproduction in animals happens by mixing half the mother’s DNA with half the father’s DNA. The way this actually happens is DNA is broken up in to bundles called chromosomes, each offspring should have 2 copies of each chromosome, and they get one copy from their mother and a second copy from their father.
If the number of chromosomes does not match or the way the genes are organized into each chromosome are significantly different, this may have no chance of working. All the general rules we expect for how genetics works, i.e. hair color may be a mix of the parent’s hair color but eye color default to brown over blue unless *only* blue genes are present (blue is recessive) only behave in these predictable ways because each organism has 2 sets of different but *equivalent* genes organized in a similar way from each of their parents. Try to mix animals with totally different structure and organization of their genes, and you either get weird unexpected behavior or things just do not work and you cannot get living offspring.
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