Description
The last and coolest nerdsheet of them all: THE SIDERIAN COAT COLOURS!
See here the other Siderian (northern, horse-sized big cats) nerd-sheets:
In order to fully understand this nerdsheet and how these coat colours interact with each other, it’s important that you have some basic understanding of Mendelian genetics and coat colour inheritance. Knowing what genes, alleles, dominant, recessive ect means, can come in handy…
I’ve gotten an interest in coat colour genetics ever since I was in high school - somewhere in 2003. It was a returning obsession and once in a while I got this urge to dig into coat colour genetics again. So far I’ve studied cats, dogs, red foxes, arctic foxes, mink, ferrets, mice, rats, hamsters, cavy, rabbits, horses, donkeys, cattle, pigs, goats, sheep and alpacas. With all that combined knowledge (also of wild mammals), I managed to get a good sense of coat colour genetics in Siderians. I was first very tempted to think of ALL possible coat colour mutations in Siderians, but that turned out to be way too much and way too unlikely for a wild species. Yes, for a wild species, Siderians already exhibit a very wide range of colour variants due to sexual selection (Siderians my find some ‘spectacular’ colours attractive) but there is still some advantage of camouflage. Hence the rarity of conspicuous colour effects like piebald spotting. White and light silver is also rarer among Siderians living in warmer climates. Some Siderians also change colour seasonally, at least to some extent.
Anyway – I decided to limit this overview to the Siderians of whom I know the coat colour (that is already about 180 individuals) and this would give me a much more honest and better insight in which colours actually occur in Siderians and which don’t. Since I don’t actively ‘shape’ or ‘create’ Siderians (they just appear to me), they don't tend to have the most beautiful, spectacular coat colours that I can think of... Therefore, most Siderians appear to be solid black/blue/brown/white or some ‘boring’ pale (silver) tabby variant with more or less counter-shading but no piebald spotting.