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[Kweri]

When breeding animals, things like size, muscle, and fatness are inherited from parents, right? Is it always inherited from one parent, or is there randomness attached?

What exactly do those parameters do? Are they used for butchering returns? Do large/muscled creatures have any combat advantage? Would fat be an advantage or disadvantage in combat?

What about color? I had some orange with black spots giant leopards (or might have been jaguars, I forget) and the female gave birth to three cubs - one of which was white. I checked the raws and sure enough, turns out under the color distributions they had a 1/1000 chance of being white. I assume that since neither parent was white, either color has a CHANCE to be determined by parents and a chance to just pull from the color distribution chart, or it's always pulled from the chart. Anyone have some more insight on this?

[Lytha]

Keep the white one and check out the ratio of its cubs' colour. Or was it male? If so, you'll have to kill all the other males and then check out the ratio of the cubs' colours.

[Kweri]

It was male, and unfortunately I don't have that fort anymore. :\

I was going to keep track of my dogs' colors and see if their offspring tended to inherit or grab some random color each time on my fort after that one - but all of them were killed by an alligator pretty much immediately (the wagon was one tile away from a river - the alligator then proceeded to chase my muskox around the map which gave me time to dig into a safer location with my dwarves).

Crossing my fingers that my next embark will let me take a stab at figuring these things out, but if anyone else has any insight that would be awesome.

[Bognor]

Given Toady's awesome dedication to detail and realism, I'd imagine he'd have implemented some system loosely based on real genetics.  I can conceive a few ways in which he might have done this... but I'm curious to know exactly what you gleaned from the raws before speculating further 

[cyks]

I am pretty sure a forum search should reveal the answer.  I have heard about one fort that took this approach to their meat industry.

[Kweri]

After a bit of digging (forum search led to a thread which mentioned this thread's author) I think I found what you were talking about... http://www.bay12forums.com/smf/index.php?topic=53429.0

So it seems size etc are inherited, size and musculature increase meat gains. His results also indicate colors were inherited.

I downloaded Runesmith to see if it could give me a bit more information about animals - I noticed a correlation between an animal's strength attribute and muscle description but couldn't find any attributes that seemed to correspond to fatness or size. I'm fairly certain these values exist, just that runesmith isn't configured to show them.

That still doesn't completely explain my white cub.

This is the hair color section in the raws for giant leopards: [TL_COLOR_MODIFIER:SPOTS_ORANGE_BLACK:990:BLACK:10:WHITE:1]
Here's the one for cows: [TL_COLOR_MODIFIER:BLACK:1:BROWN:1:WHITE:1:GRAY:1:LIGHT_BROWN:1 (etc, many more colors listed with a weight of 1)

I am 99% certain that the father was my other tame giant leopard. I can think of a few possibilities.

1) The father was actually another giant leopard who was white and wandered onto the map at the right time to impregnate my female
2) There's some recessive trait-like behavior going on
3) There's a chance for colors to be chosen randomly as well as inherited

At this point, without access to that old fort, there's not much more I can do to test that unless I get extremely lucky and end up with a rare color animal again.

[LionSilverWolf]

I would have to say that it's an extremely rare trait passed along, as genetics are, that only shows up in evidence when the cards land just right. I don't know if you'd ever be able to get it to breed true.

[Icarosaurvus]

About the previous question s to whether or not musculature effects combat, after sending a pack of many dozens of wardogs after some goblin lashers, I noticed that almost all the ones that lived had something like "He has enormous muscles".
I presume this means that the muscular dogs had a combat advantage.