A liger is a hybrid of a male lion and a female tiger, also called a tigress.
The name “liger” combines lion and tiger. Its parents belong to different species but share the genus Panthera: the lion is Panthera leo and the tiger is Panthera tigris. The reverse cross—a male tiger and a female lion—is called a tigon, so the direction of the pairing matters.
Ligers generally have a tawny coat with faint tiger stripes and may show some spotting inherited from lion ancestry. They often grow larger than either parent species, a pattern linked to differences in growth-regulating genes. Their size does not make them a separate wild species; ligers are produced in captivity and are not established as a natural population.
Male ligers are typically sterile, while female ligers can sometimes be fertile. Hybridization can also involve health and welfare concerns, and conservation-focused zoos generally do not breed ligers because they do not represent a threatened wild lineage. The liger’s unusual appearance therefore reflects captive hybridization, not a normal big-cat species.