All Angles Creatures

Yellow Common Wall Lizard

peer reviewedBCO2recessive

How it inherits

One copy
One copy shows nothing at all. The animal looks ordinary and is called a carrier, or “het”.
Two copies
Two copies, one from each parent, are needed before it appears.

Yellow carrier × Yellow carrier

Four ways the two can meet.

1 in 4het Yellow
1 in 4het Yellow
1 in 4Yellow
1 in 4Normal
  • het Yellow50%
  • Yellow25%
  • Normal25%

A pale box is an animal that shows the morph. These are the odds for each egg on its own, not a promise about a clutch.

What this rests on

A peer-reviewed paper identifies the variant behind this morph in the gene BCO2.

  • Regulatory changes in pterin and carotenoid genes underlie balanced color polymorphisms in the wall lizard.Proc Natl Acad Sci U S A 2019
  • Pterin-based pigmentation in animals.Biol Lett 2021
  • Physiological phenotypes differ among color morphs in introduced common wall lizards (Podarcis muralis).Integr Zool 2024
  • The role of historical biogeography in shaping colour morph diversity in the common wall lizard.Mol Ecol 2024
  • Colour morphs as alternative solutions to the trade-off predicted by the immuno-competence handicap hypothesis.Integr Zool 2025

Entry in Online Mendelian Inheritance in Animals

What happens if you breed it

Every pairing involving Yellow, worked out gene by gene — including what the clutch can be and anything documented about the animals it produces.

See every Common Wall Lizard pairing

Other Common Wall Lizard morphs