These are what wild STOs look like! They have brown ears and fur. The tummy is a little lighter and they have white little paws. There are subtle differences, some are a little grey, others a little more chestnut, but this is the color that keeps STOs safe in the forests or Brazil.

Also known as ivory, but I have a soft spot for elephants. An overall lighter color with a yellow hue. When a standard and a golden reproduce the offspring are roughly a 50/50 split between the two. If two goldens reproduce there are moslty goldens with a smaller proportion of standards. There is no "super" form when the two goldens are combined.

The golden ladies seem to have extra soft fur (might be coincidence).

White-bellies (WB) have white patches on the stomach that start at the breast between their arms. The pattern can extend from the neck nearly to the cloaca. WB vary from having a small patch (usually between the forearms), split patches down the stomach, a thin line or white, or a full line which can be thin or much of the tummy.

The trait is an incomplete dominant. An STO with a high amount of WB bred with a standard will have babies with a variable amount of blotching and some without.

So far I've only seen blotching related to golden/ivory opossums.

The ears are white and the color tends to be light overall. I'd read about the color in a single very old (outdated) color guide. It was a pleasant surprise when we stumbled across one by accident several years ago. I'm seeing more pop up.

I'm still unsure as to how this gene works. So far, a standard to a white-ear (WE) produced standards and a few lighter, but not WE babies. Then one of the lighter females bred with a blotched golden produced a 50/50 split of WE and standards. There were a few with small blotching (1 standard and 2 WE babies). 

I was very surprised that WE skipped a generation. As I can be fairly confident my ivory line didn't have WE in his genes, I don't think its simply recessive. Not only that, but there weren't any goldens in the litter which should share 50/50 with the standards. The litter was WE&golden or just standard.

To note: our first WE had a white scrotum, but I don't think its related to the blotched gene as there were no marking closer the the breast. The lighter color "blended" with the standard color in G1. The light color might be from a different gene than the golden. We are currently working with them to learn more.

A morph of our own creation. It started with one of our first litters. A golden mom and standard dad produced a little girl with a white-tipped tail. Goldens seem prone to having lighter tail tips (not all, but many). However that one little girl not only had more white on the tail, but her descendants also had a chance of more white. The descendants of that girl have more variation in tail tips. By being selective in the goldens we breed into that line we have gotten ~1cm of white on the tail tips.

Some of her descendants are out there now, I've seen little frosted tails here and there, but it rapidly reduces when outbred without careful consideration. I would consider it line bred, but it doesn't require the high amount of inbreeding commonly associated with line bred colorations. Just good matchmaking.