>Their last common ancestor swam during the age of the dinosaurs, and the two have been evolving independently, on opposite sides of the planet, for over 184 million years — which makes them nearly twice as evolutionarily diverged as humans and mice. That led scientists to assume that they were too evolutionarily diverged to be hybridized.

This seems to bounce the ball back into the court of that wacky geneticist who released his theory about 10-15 years ago that modern humans are the offspring of a pig and a one of the chimp-like simian ancestors.

I like the theory for a couple reasons. One, it absolutely disgusts and offends people (especially religious people). Two, it clearly explains animals like the platypus (in which a clearly horny beaver serially raped a lineage of ducks or vice versa). Three, it completes the picture of animal sexual response, which is plastic (most mammals and people will have sex with anything including inanimate objects) and indiscriminate (fish release eggs and sperm directly into the environment, and dogs raping cats, etc) with the proliferation of speciation which seems to have moved a bit too fast for the environment to account for differences alone and diversity of otherwise closely related species (like humans and pigs).