I have not come across a green coloured (or with green colours) animal. But many birds are green coloured. Why

Question

Sorry, I meant green coloured mammal.

Answer 1

Frogs, birds, and other animals that have green coloration don't actually make green pigments (same with purple and blue). The colors you see in birds and reptiles are created by a combination of the result of different molecular structures that cause refraction of light, using the same black and yellowish red pigments found in mammals. Fish and chameleons colors change by altering the shape of refractory cells in the skin, not by rapid production or release of a colored pigment. Blue and green colors in human eyes are also caused by refraction.

You really can't answer this question definitively - perhaps its a quirk of evolution where the ancestors to mammals happen to lack the ability to produce pigments or other properties necessary to make fur appear green. Maybe fur colors other than green have had a selective advantage. Or maybe fur needs to have a certain molecular structure to provide insulation, which precludes the type of structure needed to produce bright colors. There are probably other possible reasons why fur isn't green.

Answer 2

You apparently mean mammals.
There is a species of south American sloth that has single-celled algae growing symbiotically in its fur, and thus it appears to be green, blending in with the environment even better.
The algae, for their part, can be found only on this sloth and nowhere else.
Why not more mammals have developed a green color is very probably down to the fact that most animals are nocturnal anyway, when colour doesn't count. Other mammals are coloured to bled in with their environment extremely well, but these environments just don't happen to be green: Savannah and desert animals are sand coloured, arctic bears, foxes and hares are white and mammals living not in the jungle but in milder climate forests are brown or black as the ground and the bark.

Answer 3

The answer is pretty obvious, just from your description. The mutation that causes red plumage clearly occurred *after* the branching between the two lineages ... their common ancestor did not have the "red plumage" allele. That explains why the budgies will not have a naturally occurring red form, but the Bourke's parakeet does. >"You could mutate the budgie for years and get all sorts of greens, blues ..." That phrase "mutate the budgie" is a bit odd. You can't "mutate" a species. You can *breed* a species, but you can't "mutate" it. The occurrence of mutation is not predictable or controllable ... much less a *specific* mutation. A species could go tens of thousands of generations without the specific mutation you are thinking of. And that is evidently what happened at some point to the Bourke's parakeet. That is something that can easily happen over thousands to *tens of thousands* of years that might never happen in even the few hundred (?) years that we have been domesticating budgies and parakeets. So yes, you are correct that a human breeder could breed a bird for dozens of generations and never produce a bird with a color not in its genes. But that does NOT "prove" that such a color could not occur spontaneously through a mutation in one of those genes over the course of tens of thousands (not just a few dozen) generations. This is an example of the "no new information" argument that you will find -- in many different guises -- in Creationist web sites. The argument basically goes: "scientists are unable to produce a controlled experiment (like breeding) showing the mutation of a new gene that didn't exist before ... therefore there is no evidence that new genes (new 'information') can occur through mutation." But this is making a *fundamental* mistake! There are other kinds of evidence besides controlled experiments. The way we see that such mutations have occurred is by looking at two species that vary in a particular trait, and showing that this trait is traceable to a specific kind of mutation (a point mutation, frameshift error, duplication error) that we know to occur all the time. We don't have to "witness" the particular mutation "as it happens" ... we just look for the tell-tale markers that it did occur ... in the same way that we don't have to "witness" a crime or a fire "as it occurs" to know that it did occur ... we just look for the tell-tale evidence (the clues in a crime, or the ashes of a burned down forest) of the event. I don't know if the specific genetic basis for color differences in budgies and parakeets has been studied ... but I do know that the genetic basis for plumage colors in birds in general has been studied extensively. (See source.)

Answer 4

A sloth moves so slow that moss grows on it and it appears to be green, This helps it blend in with the trees it lives in.

I once saw my little brother turn green

Answer 5

Not only birds but many snakes, lizards & frogs are also green. It helps them to blend in with the enviroment. This way they can eithier hide from prey and/or predators

Answer 6

Well, if you think about it, most birds live in trees. So, to protect themselves from predators, they have to blend in, and their feathers being green aids them in that.

Answer 7

Do you mean green colored mammals? There are tons of green colored reptiles, amphibians, and fish.

Answer 8

Not seen a chameleon then?