The pattern may occur in many breeds, but some breeds are consistently colour-sided; these include the English Longhorn, and the Irish Moiled in the British Isles, and the Randall Lineback in the United States.
[1]: 48 [2]: xxii, 127 A similar colour pattern is seen in the domestic yak[1]: 48 and in some zebuine cattle.
[2]: 127 Colour-sidedness was discussed in The Journal of Heredity in 1925 by Christian Wriedt, who probably coined the term.
[4]: 465 [3]: 51 The mechanism of transmission of the colour-pointed pattern was identified and investigated in 2011–2013 by Keith Durkin, Bertram Brenig [de] and others.
[2]: xxii It involves an unusual translocation, through a ring-shaped intermediate DNA fragment, of the KIT gene between chromosomes 6 and 29.