Thursday, January 13, 2011

Cat Colorings

I found this chart on Cheezburger to be fascinating.


Click on it for the proper-sized image. It's loaded with good stuff. Check out the info at the bottom of the chart where it tells you how coloring happens in cat embryos.

4 comments:

Rose said...

fantastic!

K T Cat said...

I loved it, too. I kind of want a wall poster of this.

tim eisele said...

Speaking of which, have you heard about Belyaev's fox farm experiment? He selected silver foxes for tameness, and found that as a side effect of becoming tame they also developed a whole set of traits that we associate with domesticated animals. One of which is a greater variation in coat colors, particularly the piebald patterns.

So, a lot of these coat colors on the cat chart are common specifically because we've been selecting cats for friendliness and tameness.

K T Cat said...

Tim, to use the proper scientific jargon: genetics is freaky stuff, man.