Hybridization in Animal Evolution

This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 3 of this Preprint. You must log in to post a comment. There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. This is a Preprint and has not been peer reviewed. This is version 3 of this Preprint. Add a Comment You must log in to post a comment. Comments There are no comments or no comments have been made public for this article. In the past two decades, it has become clear that hybridization is so common in animal species as to be an almost universal feature of their evolutionary histories. Remnants of both ancient and contemporary hybridization events are present in the genomes of modern species, but their consequences are still not completely understood. In this review, we synthesize what is known about the evolutionary and genetic drivers of ancestry variation across the genome, highlighting mechanisms that play an important role in many species groups including the impacts of the local recombination rate and the role of selection in the earliest generations following hybridization. We discuss advances in our understanding of the long-term evolutionary consequences of hybridization, including the role of introgression in adaptation, and the factors that shape these consequences. We conclude with a discussion of the impacts of hybridization on conservation efforts and outline outstanding challenges in the field. https://doi.org/10.32942/X21380 Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Life Sciences hybridization, introgression, animal evolution, speciation, reproductive isolation, hybrid incompatibilities Published: 2026-05-11 18:45 Last Updated: 2026-05-12 01:57 CC-By Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International Conflict of interest statement: None Data and Code Availability Statement: All code used in the generation of figures in this manuscript is available at https://github.com/KelsieHunnicutt/Hunnicutt_Schumer_2026_Hybridization_in_Animal_Evolution. Language: English