Colour and Coat Varieties
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CinnamonThere is a lovely picture of a cinnamon on the Midland Hamster Club site. One of the earliest colour mutations, cinnamon was first described in 1960. It was named ‘brown’ by the late Roy Robinson. A closely-related colour mutation, rust, also appeared in the 1960s. There is no difficulty distinguishing 'pure' rust from cinnamon, as the latter has pink eyes, but the effect of the two genes on the coat is quite similar. It is probably worth quoting Roy from his article in the Journal of Heredity in 1987 (J Hered 78:128-129 1987): “The brown gene produces a bright orange-brown coat, overlaid with light-coloured guard hairs. The skin of the ears is light brown, while the eyes have pale brown irises and red pupils; the overall effect is that of a red-eye that darkens with age. The rust gene produces a similarly-coloured coat but of a duller tone. The skin of the ear is medium brown while the eyes have light brown irises and a dark pupil that glows dull red under bright illumination. Again, the eye colour darkens with age.” In this excellent paper, Roy presents micrographs of hairs from hamster and mouse, and shows clearly that the shape of the pigment granules in the ‘brown’ hamster are very similar to the mouse pink-eyed dilution. On the basis of this, the symbol for the ‘brown’ gene was changed to ‘p’, a reference to ‘pink-eyed dilution’. The variety became known as cinnamon among fanciers, a reflection of the orange colouration of the top coat. Cinnamon is a Standard Colour for showing. Popular varieties that use the cinnamon (p) gene as a component include:
[Submitted by Grant Forrest, last updated 1-March 2006] |
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