Cinnamon Pastel

This is our second signature mutation produced here at Graziani Reptiles.

In the summer of 1997, I was going through shipments of ball pythons at Strictly Reptiles in Hollywood FL. I was looking for minor aberrancies, like odd colors and patterns. That day I picked out two hundred hatchling ball pythons out of thousands. One of the males that I picked had an odd cinnamon color and he was not as bright as the rest. His dorsal pattern was normal, but his side pattern showed some unusual blushing in the dark bands coming down towards the belly. His belly and upper labial scales were similar to those of the Pastel Jungle mutation. His belly had no black flecking like a normal ball python and his upper labial scales were light colored. The typical yellow/gold stripe that runs from the nostril through the eye to the rear of the cheek on most ball pythons was extremely reduced and was a pale tan color. The top half of the iris was silver, similar to the gold color in the top half of the Pastel Jungle’s iris. After a closer look at him we realized that he contained no yellow pigment. At that time we were calling him a Cinnamon ball python.

We proved him to be genetic in the summer of 2002 when we bred our wild caught Cinnamon Pastel male to 3 wild caught females. All 3 females laid eggs and out of 18 eggs we hatched 8 Cinnamon Pastels, which proved this mutation to be dominant. At that time we changed the name from Cinnamon to Cinnamon Pastel. The reason for the name change was because there were a number of other ball pythons that were being called cinnamon that did not resemble this mutation and did not prove to be genetic. Since this mutation had some similarities with the Pastel Jungle mutation, we called them Cinnamon Pastels. I know there is nothing pastel about them, but we needed to make sure people could distinguish between our proven mutation and the other unproven cinnamons. Since that time, when most people refer to them, they just call them Cinnamon. Kind of like the Spider, it was originally called Spider Webbed and after time the Webbed was dropped.

Since we produced the first Cinnamon Pastels both Chris McQuade and Brian Barczyk have produced what is believed to be Super Cinnamons (the homozygous form of Cinnamon Pastel). The super form of the Cinnamon is a solid black ball python with a white belly. If this is indeed the homozygous form, then bred to any other ball python it will produce 100% Cinnamon Pastels.

In 2003, we bred our Cinnamon Pastel male to a Pastel Jungle female and produced the first Pewter Pastels. That breeding is what really convinced the majority in the ball python industry that the Cinnamon Pastel was a valuable asset to have in their collection. In 2002, when we produced the first Cinnamon Pastels we priced them at $7.500.00 each. That was the going rate for the Mojave and we thought that the Mojave was a comparable mutation. Well, once again the Snake Keeper (Dan and Colette Sutherland) were on the ball and were the only ones that year to invest in that project with us. Once the Pewter Pastels were produced, the Cinnamon Pastels went up to $15,000.00 each and we were sold out of Cinnamon Pastels by the 2003 National Reptile Breeders’ Expo in Daytona.