Lord Morton’s Mare

Lord Morton’s Mare is an often referenced example in the history of evolutionary theory.

In the 19th century, Lord Morton, an amateur horse breeder, and a friend of Charles Darwin, bred a white mare with a zebra stallion. Later Lord Morton bred the same mare with a white stallion but the offspring had strange stripes in the legs.

This led to the idea of telegony in heritability, which remained a legitimate theory until Mendel's experiments. Biologists now explain this phenomenon using dominant and recessive alleles.