Re this purple squirrel I was just wondering if purple fur naturally occurs on any mammals in nature?
I think your linking book is broken. When you find the one that works meet me in Riven.
I tried to find a link but i only get retailers and the like for this.
In Australia a long time ago one man reported a blue wallaby. Nobody else could find one and so he was basically not believed. A few years ago somebody found the blue wallabies again. The animal excretes a substance and it colors the hair blue. The color washes out with water. It’s not purple or permanent, but I thought you’d be interested.
one eyed, one horned, flying purple people eater…
And here I always thought that the monster ate purple people.
Does purple and green hide count?
Mandrills have purple on their butts, but I’m not sure it’s actual fur, as opposed to just purple skin showing through the fur.
I can’t think offhand of any mammals that have truly purple hair or fur, though some have purple patches of skin. While red and orange tones can be created by melanin, purple would require a blue tone, and such pigments are rare in vertebrates. Most blue and green colors in birds, reptiles, and amphibians are structural colors created by features of the surface of the feathers, scales, or skin. Evidently mammalian hair does not lend itself to the creation of such structural colors.
Never mind, didn’t read the part about the fur.
What would be the point?
The terrain in forested areas is mainly greens & browns, in plains area fields you get yellows added. But purple fur would stand out vividly, and make them real obvious to all the predators in the area.
So it seems like any mutation that left a mammal with purple fur would have real disadvantages evolutionarily – they likely wouldn’t survive long enough to breed & pass this gene on.
Well, sometimes an animal *wants *to stand out, for example, with mating colors.
Valete,
Vox Imperatoris