sutton026

T he Eurasian wild horse subspecies, Equus ferus ferus, was, according to genetic research, not uniform in colour as most large mammals but displayed a number of colour variants. These have been summed up in this post. Paleoartist Maija Karala published a wonderful table on deviantArt showing all colour variants suggested by genetic data and ancient cave art (please do not use without permission):  © Maija Karala On dA, you also find a comprehensive description: https://www.deviantart.com/eurwentala/art/Wild-Horses-3-771025306 I especially like how the leopard spotted pattern has been illustrated, that way it looks really credible for a wildtype animal.  I only have two remarks. As far as I know, the black phenotype suppresses the expression of pangare/countershading, so the black horse should be wholly black, and the chestnut allele e is, as far as the literature that I know, is a mutation in domestic horses that did not show up before the Holocene.  Literature   ...

I have noticed that a lot of genetic terms have been kind of misused in “breeding-back”, and I was guilty of that myself in the past. It should always be paid attention that technical terms are used in the true conventional meaning of the word. In this post I give a little overview over the terms that I have noticed to have been used wrongly (and I used wrongly myself in the past).  Phenotype:  While “genotype” is quite clear, there might be a misunderstanding of what a phenotype actually is. A phenotype is not just the looks or the physical morphology of the animal, but every factual aspect of the living organism – its morphology, its physiology, its behaviour et cetera. So when you talk about a bull with a “good/suitable phenotype” you are also talking about its behaviour and all other aspects. The phenotype is not only influenced by the genotype alone but also environmental and epigenetic factors, and the interesting thing is that there is mutual influence between those fa...

I have been doing posts on the organismic differences between aurochs and cattle lately (go here for an in-depth coverage of these differences, and here for a test of “genetic breeding-back”). Here comes another one, this time applying what I have outlined in the previous articles on particular cattle breeds and individuals. Actually, I have been using a wrong dichotomy in all of my previous posts: cattle and aurochs. There is no distinctive line between these two animal types. Aurochs were snatched out from the wild and slowly transformed into domestic cattle in a fluid process with all kinds of intermediate stages. And in the end, even the most-derived modern domestic cattle would probably still be able to reproduce readily and successfully with aurochs and they still do share many characters in morphology, ecology and behaviour. This is why they are still considered members of the same species by most authors. More precisely and correctly, cattle are  man-made modified design...