Editing Liger (section)

==Appearance==
[[File:1799-liger.jpg|thumb|Color plate of the offspring of a lion and tiger, [[Étienne Geoffroy Saint-Hilaire]]]]

The liger has a faint tiger-like striped pattern upon a lionesque tawny background. In addition, it may inherit [[Rosette (zoology)|rosettes]] from the lion parent (lion cubs are rosetted and some adults retain faint markings). These markings may be black, dark brown or sandy. The background color may be correspondingly tawny, sandy or golden. In common with tigers, as an example of [[countershading]], the underparts are pale. The specific pattern and color depend upon which subspecies the parents were and how the genes interact in the offspring.

[[White tiger]]s have been crossed with lions to produce "white" (actually pale golden) ligers. In theory, white tigers could be crossed with [[white lion]]s to produce white, very pale or even stripeless ligers. There are no black ligers. Very few [[Black tiger (animal)|melanistic tigers]] have ever been recorded, most being due to excessive markings (pseudo-melanism or [[abundism]]) rather than true melanism; no reports of black lions have ever been substantiated. As blue or [[Maltese tiger]]s probably no longer exist, gray or blue ligers are exceedingly improbable. It is not impossible for a liger to be white, but it is very rare. The first known white ligers were born in December 2013 at Myrtle Beach Safari in [[Myrtle Beach, South Carolina]] to a white male lion and a white female tiger.<ref>{{cite web|url=https://www.guinnessworldrecords.com/world-records/404109-first-white-ligers/|title=First white ligers|publisher=[[Guinness World Records]]|access-date=5 December 2019}}</ref>