History Main / MixAndMatchCritters

** ''Film/Godzilla2014'' also features the Mutos, Godzilla's opponents, which critics have most commonly characterized as a mix between a preying mantis and a pterosaur.

* ''ComicBook/Bone'': The Great Red Dragon has the head of a christmas donkey, the body of a brontosaurus and the paws of a lion.

** The Night/Clone-Creature in ''ComicBook/TheFrankensteinMonster'' is created from two dozen different animal [=DNAs=], with the boar and alligator parts being most prominent in its actual appearance.
** Gog N'MaGog (or "Pup" as Longshot calls him) from the original ''[[Characters/XMenMojoverse Longshot]]'' miniseries starts the story as something best described as a clawed monkey/bear hybrid with a beard and a mohawk. He keeps absorbing Earth's magic during the story, thus mutating from issue to issue. He ends up with a reptilian tail and stegosaurus plates on his back.

* The Creator/DrSeuss book ''Litrrature/HortonHatchesTheEgg'' ends with the egg [[Literature/HortonHearsAWho Horton the Elephant]] was taking care of [[WhaleEgg hatching into a tiny elephant with wings]].

* The Creator/DrSeuss book ''Horton Hatches the Egg'' ends with the egg [[Literature/HortonHearsAWho Horton the Elephant]] was taking care of [[WhaleEgg hatching into a tiny elephant with wings]].

[[folder:Anime and Manga]]

* In Myth/JapaneseMythology there is a chimerical creature called the {{Nue}}, with the body of a dog, the legs of a tiger, the face of a monkey, the tail of a snake, and the voice of a thrush. Famously the Emperor Konoe suffered nightmares, and one of his servants noticed a black cloud hanging over the palace. The servant shot an arrow at the cloud and out of it fell the monstrous Nue.
** Also from Japanese myth is the baku is a DreamEater with the head of an elephant, the body of a bear, the limbs of a tiger, the ears and eyes of a rhinoceros, and the tail of an ox. In fact, it is said that the first baku was created by the gods from spare parts left over from the creation of all other animals.

[[folder:Stand-Up]]
* Woody Allen describing the Great Roe, which has "the head of a lion and the body of a lion, although not the same lion".
* Mocked by comedian Demetri Martin in his "visual enhancers" act, in which he declared that you could make a fantasy animal by taking any existing animal and adding wings. He gave as examples Pegasus (horse) and the griffin (lion)... and then a hawk, displaying a picture of a four-winged hawk saying "I'm awkward."
** Further parodied when he suggested creatures no one ever heard about, like a mermaid that's half fish but split ''vertically'' instead of horizontally. Another was the "Zebratard" who was 1/2 zebra, 1/2 hawk, 1/2 pig and thus was an improper fraction.
* The meanest animal in Africa is the crocolion, half crocodile in front, half lion in back. How does it poop? Again, ''meanest'' animal in Africa.
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* In ''Fanfic/TheNightUnfurls'', any appearance of EliteMooks of this feature can be easily traced back to [[EvilSorcerer Shamuhaza's]] [[PlayingWithSyringes experiments]].

* ''Teen Titans: Together for Tomorrow'', Conner adopts Cobalt, an alien "[[CallASmeerpARabbit dog]]" that looks like a white and blue wolf with a lion's mane and tail, long horse's ears, and a crystal growth on his snout shaped like a rhino's horns.

* ''Art/BeastFables'': Chimeras are animals capable of a partial version of the human werecreatures' shapeshifting, which allows them to take on the features of one or two other species. Unlike humans, who include individuals capable of transforming into almost all terrestrial or amphibious creatures, most animal species are only known to have one chimeric form. The exception is equines, which have [[https://twitter.com/A3Dnazrigar/status/1691277008553308160 six]].
Examples include [[ClassicalChimera true chimeras]], lions that can give themselves reptilian bodies and goat horns; amphisabaenae, bustards that can grow scorpions tails colored like their real heads; splendid bullfrogs, [[PunBasedCreature bullfrogs that grow real bull horns]]; and [[FearsomeCrittersOfAmericanFolklore jackalopes]], hares that can sprout antlers.

* ''Art/BeastFables'': Chimeras are animals capable of a partial version of the human werecreatures' shapeshifting, which allows them to take on the features of one or two other species. Unlike humans, who include individuals capable of transforming into almost all terrestrial or amphibious creatures, each animal species can only transform into a single chimeric form. Examples include [[ClassicalChimera true chimeras]], lions that can give themselves reptilian bodies and goat horns; amphisabaenae, bustards that can grow scorpions tails colored like their real heads; splendid bullfrogs, [[PunBasedCreature bullfrogs that grow real bull horns]]; and [[FearsomeCrittersOfAmericanFolklore jackalopes]], hares that can sprout antlers.

** ''WebOriginal/HamstersParadise'' fills every concievable niche with descendants of ''hamsters'', such as the hammoth, a giant herbivore resembling a cross of bison and capybara with mammoth-like tusks that branch like moose antlers, the giraard, a giraffe-analogue hamster descendant that filled an aardvark-like insectivore niche, and the greater snoa, a member of the trunked macropod-like rhinocheirids that is best described as a cross between an elephant, a kangaroo, a mallard duck and a therizinosaur.

** The "be strong for mother" meme comes from interpreting a Doduo / Weepinbell mashup as [[http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/be-strong-for-mother a guy forced to take care of his mentally-retarded conjoined brother.]]

** ''WebOriginal/{{Serina}}'' has canaries overrun a terraformed planet with no other competition. Over millions of years, they evolve into FantasticFaunaCounterpart of different birds, such as the falocnaries and the sparrowgulls, and others take on forms such as the deer-like serezelles, the primate-like ornkeys and the aquatic fish-like eargills.

** ''WebOriginal/{{Amphiterra}}'' features a parallel universe where ''frogs'' are the dominant species. As such, they fill the niches of other animals, such as the Tree Frixel, resembling a mix of tree frog and gibbon, or the Catastrophic Fraggon, a large predator resembling a cross of a toad and a tyrannosaur.

*** Farto, a fusion between a Farfetch'd and a Ditto. Also doubles as a ShoutOut to Creator/ProZD's joke about terrible Pokemon nicknames, in which a Pikachu had to accept being nicknamed Farto.

** As shown with Discord in canon, Draconequui in general are a divine mishmash of traits from various creatures that usually pertain to their personalities and abilities. How they're created is unknown, but it is possible for mortals to turn into one upon Ascension, such as Pinkie Pie, an Earth pony (though it's heavily implied she's a very distant descendant of one of Pakak's Draconequus daughters), and King Ibrida, who started out as the first Pony-Griffon hybrid Miracle Wing.
** Though not as obvious as the Draconequui, Alicorns contain a mishmash of traits from various Pony tribes in their true forms, due to them being physical and magical embodiments of Ponykind, and can manifest them individually at any time. However, traits of Pony tribes like [[MagicMusic Musical Ponies]] and [[OurHippocampsAreDifferent Sea Ponies]] are lesser-known to modern Alicorns. This includes traits of the Flutter Ponies, who have since become extinct, with the arrival of the last surviving Flutter Pony, astronaut Star Flower, on Equus after spending three Ages being trapped in space.

* The children's book ''[[http://www.vintagechildrensbooks.com/index.php?main_page=product_info&products_id=9627 Scranimals]]'' is about an island filled with these. Some are straight-up animal-animal combinations, but the majority are half-animal, half-fruit (or half-vegetable). Examples include the broccolion, the radishark, the ''orange''utan, and the ostricheetah.

** Turvy: a bat with hedgehog quills.

** The {{Elseworld}} ''ComicBook/BatmanCastleOfTheBat'' has Bruce Wayne create a dog with the head of a bat, in addition to his FrankensteinsMonster created using the brain of his father Thomas mutating to the point of gaining a bat's head after being injected with "essence of bat".
* ''ComicBook/DungeonTwilight'': Due to AllSpeciesAreSexuallyCompatible the children of the duck protagonist are cats with beaks.

** In ''ComicBook/TheAutumnlandsToothAndClaw'' There are birds with human-like hands in place of their feet for some as yet unknown reason.
** In ''ComicBook/ShamansTears'', Thom Broadarrow is exposed to the Circle Sea mutagenic compound and is transformed into a composite of a dozen different creatures found in his taxidermy shop.

** ''ComicBook/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicIDW'': In "[[Recap/MyLittlePonyFriendshipIsMagicIDWIssue75To78 Cosmos]]", the titular villain, the spirit of malice, has a dragon-like head and wings, a cobra's hood, bird talons for arms, a feline body, and a scorpion tail. [[spoiler:Once she fuses with the Princesses, Big Mac, and Zecora, a number of their traits -- such Zecora's stripes, Big Mac's legs, Luna's wings, Celestia's tail and Cadance and Twilight's manes — are slapped onto her as well.]]

* ''Beast Wars'' "Fuzors," Maximals and Predacons whose beast modes are combined from two different animals, which make some weird combinations, like Injector (lionfish/hornet), Buzzsaw (mantis/lizard) and Air Hammer (hammerhead shark/hawk). While the line had several, only two[[note]]Silverbolt (wolf/eagle) and Quickstrike (scorpion/cobra)[[/note]] would appear in [[WesternAnimation/BeastWars the animated series]].

* ''Literature/InfernoLarryNivenAndJerryPournelle'': A man who started a fraud religion based on the concept of remembering one's past lives as pre-human animals is sentenced to the bolgia of the schismatics and turned into what Allen calls "the last word in centaurs". He has the back end of a trilobite, then the torso of a primitive fish, then that of a more advanced fish, and so on progressing through lungfish, proto-mammal, early mammal, ape, and finally a human head. He pulls himself along on a dozen mismatched limbs, and when he gets to the demon with the cleaver he gets chopped into component segments that each crawl along independently.

* On ''Literature/DrFranklinsIsland'', the doctor has spent a long time inserting human genes into animal subjects, a few of which the viewpoint character gets to see -- a capybara with human lips and back legs, piglets with hands, an octopus with a monkeylike head, parrots with patches of human skin and floppy boneless bits of hands, bats with human legs, deer with weird heads, a jungle cat whose brain changed which howls. His assistant says the changes can be "random".

* In one of Kipling's ''Literature/JustSoStories'', the armadillo is a product of this trope, having been created when a hedgehog and a tortoise swapped defensive strategies with one another. The tortoise learned to curl into a ball, the hedgehog acquired armor plates, and the jaguar's mother re-named the resulting mix-and-match.

* Chimairamon from ''Anime/DigimonAdventure02'' is based on the mythical chimera, and it shows. Several other species fall under this on a less extreme scale, with other obvious ones generally the product of a FusionDance.
* ''Anime/DigimonFusion'' has [=GrandGeneramon=], a Chimairamon-like mashup of the Seven Death Generals with a centauroid design created by [=DarkKnightmon=].

* West African band Osibisa, who formed in London and did a lot to make African music known in the West, adopted a flying elephant for their [=LP=] covers, which became the band's iconic mascot. This is beleived to have been inspired by a snotty and possibly racist remark made by a record company executive, who voiced the opinion that African music was as likely to take off in Britain as an elephant with wings. Osibisia's [=LP=]s became million sellers. And all of them had winged elephants on the cover -- [[Film/{{Dumbo}} often a suspicious shade of pink]], with scaled-up dragonfly wings and compound insect eyes.
* ''Music/AngusMcSix'': "Fireflies of Doom" isn't very clear about what the monsters mentioned in the title look like, but it describes them as being insects like their name suggests -- but the clearest bit of description of what they look like is that they have equine bodies.