Its hard to say without some experimental data - Edit 1
Before modification by BlackAdder at 20/10/2010 07:05:06 PM
Are the trollocs picky about the bird-head mating together and the goat-heads etc. or do they just pick one and wham-bam!(?)
If the second is the case then why aren't there goat-heads with beaks, etc. ? I think too much about weird stuff.
Well,my thought on that is cause a goat headed beak head will be more of a mutation than simple genetics. It's like when we get either our father's or mother's hair or eye color. It's one or the other, not a combination. That would just be too freaky.
So you don't get recombination between the beak and eagle face, so they always appear together, and both are dominant over the goat face/mouth combo. Or maybe there are trollocs born with a goat face and an eagle beak, but they just die so all that you see in the adult trollocs are the ones with eagle beaks and eagle faces. Or maybe trolloc chromosomes don't recombine, so you always inherit a full set from the mother and a full set from the father that are kept separate, keeping the eagle traits together and the goat traits together. Or maybe (and ooo, I like this theory) there's a single "master" gene that controls the development of all the "animal" traits, and if the master gene is a "goat" gene, the only the goat genes turn on and develop, and the eagle genes are just left inactive. EPISTASIS FTW!!
Perhaps some Shadow geneticists have this data, but we don't. It's also possible that there are, in fact, these goat-headed, beak-mouthed mutants, but they just die before birth or perhaps that mutation leaves them more vulnerable to various infections, or infertile, etc. Another reason might simply be that the loci for face and mouth features are very close together on the chromosome, so we just don't see much recombination there. Lots of other explanations, too.