This may be an ongoing post, as soon as I learn about other mutations.
Sometimes, at very early stages as embryos, twins (which are extremely rare, not to mention if this ever happened) that are fraternal (nonidentical), will fuse together to become one. One foal will be born, but sometimes (if it were two fused together), some extremely crazy, nonplanned coat colors happen. Like these:
The first thing you may say, like me, is "What the heck is that!?!"
Well, I don't quite understand it, but I did explain it a little above. Wouldn't this be the craziest thing to own? Each chimeric foal has two sets of DNA.
Something else that may happen with a horse that used to be a twin before they fused is a brindle coat pattern. Sadly, both the crazy 'paints' and the brindles is not inheritable; it is a mutation, and isn't able to pass it on, because those aren't neccesarily a coat pattern or gene.
The brindle coat pattern is both noninheritable, and inheritable. Generally, inheritable brindle doesn't look as cool, and is more faint.
Please don't mix up the first kind of chimeric horse with a horse with a somatic mutation, which looks like a 'birthmark'. It is basically just a horse that has a tiny bit of his coat 'turned off'. Like an EE AA, but the agouti got 'turned off' in a very small spot. Or it could be large, but it will be only one patch on the body.
I love this horse, he is so sporty!
This one may seem a little unexplainable, but it does make sense. I said there could be only one spot; why are there two? If you can imagine that the white spots from the paint pattern weren't there, you could turn that chestnut spot into one splotch. The white seperates it, though. So this horse is a palomino tobiano, with a somatic mutation that left a small patch of palomino undiluted.
For bay horses, the agouti gene simply got switched off a small place, leaving it black.
I don't quite understand how this horse's marking work, with the white on the bay, but she is so beautiful!
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