OH I *love* color genetics stuff :-) There is an excellent website out there that has color charts on it for looking up what the offspring might be. The link is http://www.doubledilute.com Can you tell me if the bay mare is homozygous or heterozygous for the black gene? If she has a red colored parent, then she is heterozygous. If both parents are black gened, then there is a chance that she is homozygous. If she is homozygous, she can NOT produce a red colored foal, which would eliminate sorrel, chestnut and palomino. Same with your brown mare (black with the brown muzzle is genetically the black gene, but the color, atleast in the QH world, is referred to as brown). The palomino stud carries only the red gene plus a cream gene. To help you better understand what you can get when crossing these mares on this stud, it helps to understand the genetics behind some of the colors. A palomino is a red horse with a cream gene. A buckskin is a bay horse with a cream gene. A smokey black is a black horse with a cream gene (these often look like any other black horse, yet they actually carry the cream gene). So, if a mare is heterozygous (one black and one red gene), then bred to a palomino, you can get black, bay, brown, sorrel, chestnut, palomino, buckskin or smoky black. If the mare is homozygous for the black gene, then you can get black, bay, brown, buckskin or smoky black. Interestingly, you have to get the bay agouti passed along with the black gene and the cream gene in order to get buckskin. But what's soooo interesting about that is that a red horse (or a palomino) can actually be bay but you can't actually "see" the agouti at work on the coat because there was no black to wash out and leave just at the points. Swoon N Red is a sorrel QH stud that carries the bay agouti and can produce bay offspring when bred to a black mare. Kelly |