This post first appeared on April 12, 2012
The long-awaited splashed white paper has now been published in PLoS Genetics. The full article can be read here.

As a number of people predicted, the MITF gene is involved, but there are also some surprises. One of them is that the authors looked into the odd case of the Freiberger stallion, Apache. Above is his picture from the paper, and the link from his name will take you to a site with more pictures. His owners called his odd color and pattern “macchiato.” He’s been in my “mystery” files since I first stumbled across him a year or so ago, so I was tickled to see that he was included in the paper.

It will take me a day or so, but I will try to put up a plain English summary of the paper. It is an exciting time for those of us interested in animal coloration!