Observatory - Three Genes Determine the Nature of a Dog’s Coat - NYTimes.com

Observatory - Three Genes Determine the Nature of a Dog’s Coat - NYTimes.com: "The researchers then used that information to look at a large dataset of genetic information from about 900 dogs representing 80 breeds. They were able to identify mutations at specific points, or loci, on three genes linked to fur length, curliness and growth pattern (bushy eyebrows, beards and other features that dog breeders refer to as furnishings)."

BBC - Earth News - Mouse set to be 'evolution icon'

BBC - Earth News - Mouse set to be 'evolution icon': "Linnen and colleagues at Harvard and the University of California at Berkeley have now worked out exactly how the mice evolved so quickly.

They have published the details in the journal Science.

They discovered that the light coat colour is coded by a single gene, dubbed Agouti. This is expressed at a higher amount, and for longer, than the genes that code for dark hair.

Most animals known to quickly evolve new features do so by expressing a variation of a gene that already exists, rather than evolving a new type of gene altogether.

But the researchers found that the Agouti gene only appeared among wild deer mice in Sand Hills around 4,000 years ago, just a few thousand years after dark mice colonised their new home. That means it first evolved 8000 generations of mice ago."