THE BLACK BEARDED DRAGON?

I get asked often if we have any black bearded dragons or if I know anyone that sells them. The short answer is, no. The long answer is this blog post. :)

To my knowledge, bearded dragons have only been in the states since the 1990s, and the first ones were all pretty plain-looking. Or "“normal” looking, I should say. Most were all sandy in coloring and only with selective breeding over the years have we seen colors get more and more saturated, and then the discovery of new morphs like hypo, zero, witblits, translucent, dunner, leatherback, etc. The Zero morph makes the dragons have zero pattering and retain no color. They will range from a dark gray to a light gray. With these dragons in particular, you will often see photos of them as babies and they look like a black bearded dragon.

Incredibly cool and sadly something only breeders will probably be able to experience. When they first hatch, most dragons are just naturally darker, and some zeros are crazy dark! But that is not a “black bearded dragon”— they will become a gray dragon as they age.

This is a zero dragon, starts out darker, sometimes almost black, but turns more and more gray as they age and warm up.

The hypo gene gives the dragons clear nails and lightens the pigment in their skin, so when you combine the zero gene with the hypo gene, you get an almost white dragon—those are also magnificent! Quick side note: with zeros and wits dragons, they still can have more health problems than the other morphs and colored dragons. This is why it’s so important you buy from a breeder that is knowledgeable and only picking the best dragons to breed. The first giveaway they don’t know what they are doing is if they pair a visual zero with a het zero or another visual zero to make more zeros. This weakens the lines over all. The safest and truly best way to breed for visual zeros is doing a het to het pairing (both parents carry the zero gene but are visually normal).

That’s your first main step, but then you need to make sure the het zeros you have are from a strong, healthy, properly-bred visual zero and a strong, properly-bred normal dragon with no drop of zero in their blood. This will result in all the dragons being 100% het for zero (meaning all of the babies will look normal but will carry the zero gene). You need to find that magic sauce twice and then you have one potential good breeding pair.

To get two healthy, properly-bred hypo het zeros from strong lineages is not easy, because most breeders are not doing this pairing because it produces basic-looking offspring. However, it is essential to create strong breeders for future generations of zeros, gray and white.

Back to: “is there a black bearded dragon”? So all these new morphs got discovered, but in the process, people starting being able to breed for color, and that’s how we have all the citrus, reds, blue bars, oranges, and everything in between. One of the newer colors to the states is from the Red Monster Bloodline, resulting in a very dark, almost ruby-red wine color.

This is a full Red Monster leatherback.

They are very new to the States, and originated from breeders in China. They, too, as babies can often look crazy dark and almost black. These are currently the closest thing to a black bearded dragon out there that I am aware of. They will often stay very dark even as adults, as you see from the above pictures. But a full Red Monster that is a really good-quality dark one will still be very expensive right now as they are still so new to the States. It’s a simple equation of supply and demand. They are very rare and hard to get right now, and I have seen them go anywhere from $1800-$3500+.

With the Red Monster lines being so new to the States and me not knowing much about them yet, I wanted to outcross the genes with a couple of my top local reds and see how the genetics were. From my pairings from 2022, they were some of the strongest and healthiest babies we have ever produced! Amazing structure, crazy gorgeous head shapes (big beefy triangles), and very docile dragons overall. Breeding a full Red Monster with a Red will result in what people are calling 1/2 Red Monsters. The clutches from my pairings last year resulted in about 50% being kinda more on the normal red color, 25% being slightly on the darker side, 15% being a really deep blood-red color, and 10% were awesome dark reds like their father. If you are looking for a dragon like this we have some available here. And if you don’t see any there we plan to produce more next year.