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Sujit Kumar via Wikimedia Commons under CC BY-SA 4.0 To determine the origins of squirrel melanism, or dark coloration, McRobie and colleagues from Cambridge University and the Virginia Museum of Natural History extracted DNA from gray and fox squirrel specimens found in North America.īlack squirrels are actually just gray squirrels with a different shade of fur “The most likely explanation for the black version of the gene being found in the grey squirrel is that a male black fox squirrel mated with a female grey squirrel.” “People have spotted ‘mixed species’ mating chases, with a mix of grey and fox squirrels a female,” lead author Helen McRobie of England’s Anglia Ruskin University says in a press release. This gene variant, passed from fox to gray squirrels via mating, is the same mutation responsible for black squirrels’ coloring.

As a new study published in the journal BMC Evolutionary Biology explains, squirrels sporting black coats owe their distinctive appearance to interbreeding between gray and fox squirrels, which carry a faulty pigment gene known to give some members of the predominantly reddish-brown species darker fur. Despite differences in coloring, eastern gray squirrels and so-called black squirrels are actually members of the same species.