Dunner Bearded Dragons for sale in the UK

Dunner changes the scales rather than the colour. The mutation alters the direction and the shape of each scale, and the pattern comes apart as a side effect of that. Colour tells you nothing here: a dunner can be brown, tan, yellow, orange, red or grey, and the trait sits on top of whatever line produced it.

Appearance

Scales on a normal dragon lie flat and point back towards the tail in tidy rows. A dunner's point sideways, forwards or diagonally, and the individual scales look raised, rounded or conical, so the animal reads as textured. Run a hand from head to tail and it resists. Trust the beard first: dunner beard spikes project out to the sides where a normal dragon's point down towards the belly, and the two sides of one beard often disagree with each other. The belly is the second cue, its scales swirled and mismatched instead of set in orderly rows. Pattern loses its side-to-side direction and breaks into scattered spots, tail banding included, and one flank can look markedly different from the other. Those scale cues do the identifying, because a dunner on a Zero or Witblits animal has no pattern left to read, and a leatherback dunner feels like fine sandpaper rather than smooth, the reduced spikes still growing in every direction.

Genetics

Dominant, so one copy shows and a visual dunner has a visual parent. There is no het dunner to buy on trust, which is worth remembering if a seller offers you one. Dunner is independent of colour and of the pigment mutations, and it combines freely with Hypo, Translucent, Leatherback, Genetic Stripe, Zero and Witblits, each of those bringing its own characteristics without changing how dunner is inherited. On a hypo animal the redirected scales stand out harder against the brighter ground colour, and Dunner Hypo is one of the combinations you will see most.

Known issues

The early dunner lines commonly threw animals with long, crooked toes, and at the time that was written off as part of the morph. It was not. Outcrossing and selection established it as a defect and bred it out, so it is a question about a line rather than about the trait. Worth asking about when you are looking at unfamiliar stock. The lesson travels well past this morph: if a seller explains away a physical abnormality as characteristic of a trait, ask what the rest of the clutch looked like.