Ouch, you folks are making my head hurt. lol.
I appreciate all of you trying to figure this out (and doing a pretty good job of it) by networking ideas and what you have heard here and there. I apologize that I wasn't here sooner to help with the REAL STORY. Busy time of year in this business.
Shannon is correct (and others of you also). Craig Boyd caught the progenators of the line on one of the keys back in the 90s (perhaps sooner). Before the year 2000, his breeding trials revealed that they were recessive in heritable nature. Some were virtually patternless, with the keys (rosy rat) color scheme, while others were only partially "striped". Many of you will notice the pattern on TERRAZZOS is not like that of the STRIPED corns. Prior to 2000, they were selling for $500.00 each.
Roughly three years ago, one of the other corn snake forums, decided to assign the name GRANITE to the anery A bloods. Owner of the largest corn snake web site in the U.S. and I both warned them that the name was already used to describe the original keys animal. They debated and ultimately ignored the warnings, and assigned the name to the anery A bloods anyway. Just a few months later, Kathy Love's book (CORN SNAKES - THE COMPREHENSIVE OWNER'S GUIDE) was released, and on page 192, you can see a picture of one of the original GRANITE recessive phenotypes. Until this year, breeders of the original GRANITE corns (there are few of us so far) have suffered the inflicted pains of confusion and misidentification, since the bulk of today's virtually networked corn snake keepers associate the name with anery A corns. That is, even though TERRAZZOS were the original GRANITES, those of us that had them fought an uphill and failed battle to reverse the decision of that relatively small group of corn snake "experts". Of course, many people new in this industry know the name popularly applies to anerythristic A bloodreds, so I wanted to get the real story out there, to hopefully reduce confusion.
SO . . . this year, Jeff Galewood renamed them TERRAZZO CORNS to denote their granite-like appearance. At this point, having two entirely different-looking corn morphs with the same name would be ridiculous, so we caved in and renamed them. Jeff produced some of the recessive pattern representatives of this mutation by crossing an original TERRAZZO to some Southern Florida corns. His homozygous products are redder than those original GRANITES that displayed the traditional rosy rat color scheme, but they are considered TERRAZZOS, by virtue of possessing the recessive pattern trait (presuming the trait is not allelic to an existing mutation). I produced one in 2007 from hets of the original line and I currently have several adult hets that I'll be forcing to work overtime, in an effort to resurrect the original colors - in concert with the original recessive pattern trait. All my het breeders are F1s and F2s of the original pure keys line.
Now, 'the-rest-of-the-story' . . .
I sent a striped snow corn to Jeff to breed to one of his homozygous males this year, to determine if the TERRAZZO is an allele of motley, or something new. If it is not a motley allele, TERRAZZOS will be one more pattern mutation in the corn snake family tree. If they are an allele of motley, the TERRAZZO name will apply to the unique pattern form of these gems. Though the pattern resembles some striped motlies, I see enough differences to be encouraged that we are indeed working with a new pattern mutation (if not an extreme variation of motley). Only breeding trials will show us. Fingers crossed.
In 2007, I also produced a "normally"-colored version of the TERRAZZO pattern, and a charcoal version. These were F2s of a cross between a het TERRAZZO and a pewter. Those are currently in the breeding collection of KJ and KASI LODRIGUE. No morph name has been assigned to any color combination of the TERRAZZO, so the guesses that TERRAZZO is the name assigned to a color compount product of the pattern trait are inaccurate.
SO, if TERRAZZO turns out to be a motley mutation, my charcoal "TERRAZZO" will actually be a charcoal "striped-motley". If indeed the TERRAZZO turns out to be a new pattern mutation, you can all see where this is going. There will be another sizable branch added to the corn snake family tree. Lots of different color and pattern traits to mix with it.
Just wanted to give you a more accurate history of the TERRAZZO (formerly GRANITE), so we'd all be on the same page.
Cheers,
Don Soderberg
South Mountain Reptiles
www.cornsnake.NET
South Mountain Reptiles
