"Narluga" explained

I didn't know this creature existed.  Saw it mentioned recently and had to go back to a 2019 article by Ed Yong in The Atlantic for an explanation.

Belugas and narwhals are the same size, share the same Arctic waters, and are more closely related to each other than to any other species. Individuals from both species have been found swimming among each other’s pods...

By analyzing DNA extracted from one of the creature’s teeth, a team led by Eline Lorenzen from the Natural History Museum of Denmark showed that it was a male, born to a beluga father and a narwhal mother. Most of its DNA was a half-and-half mix between the two species, but its mitochondrial DNA—a secondary set that animals inherit only from their mothers—was entirely narwhal. “A while back, we presented our findings at a conference of 150 people who are very into belugas, and you could hear a pin drop,” Lorenzen says. “None of them were familiar with hybrids between those two species.”

Lots more science at the link, but this paragraph is particularly interesting:

A brief digression: When naming hybrid animals, patriarchal conventions dictate that the father’s species comes first in the portmanteau. A cub born to a male polar bear and a female grizzly is a pizzly, but one with a grizzly dad and a polar mom is a grolar. So, technically, the skull from Larsen’s toolshed is a belwhal, not a narluga. But the latter name might well stick because it’s been called that for decades and, as Lorenzen says, narluga just sounds better.

So now I know what a pizzly and a grolar are.  You learn something every day.