Dragon Scale?

[zophie]

So, today I went back to my LFS to buy some Ancistrus. I was looking at the betta's, and noticed on the price list

Dragon scale Crown-tail

I had bought my betta, Kenji from there, he was a crowntain, and he didn't look any different.
So my Q is, What is a Dragonscale Crown-Tail Betta?

ZOphie

 

[Katty]

If I'm not mistaken, dragon(scale) bettas have very light colored metallic/silvery looking scales, usually surrounded or outlined by "normal" looking scales of a different richer color. So a dragonscale crowntail would have metallic scales as well as a spiky fins.

Doing a google image search for "dragon betta" will bring up a lot of typical dragonscale bettas. It's a lot easier to see what it is than explain it...

If it looked like a normal betta, maybe they mislabeled it or hoped someone would buy it for the name?

 

[Bretzz]

I was at a store today and they had regular veiltails beside dragonscale veiltails, the dragonscales definitely had more metallicy-looking scales, and the scaled looked bigger? could just be an illusion but the scales looked bigger than a regular bettas scales.

And another difference is the price! $5 for the regulars, $12 for dragonscale!

 

[BethK]

Dragon scaling is bigger than the normal betta scaling, you can see the difference, particularity on the head area.

They also have a thick metallic, commonly silvery-white all over but times have changed and the metallic/platinum range is more common than before. Dragons were first 'invented', using Plakets (red copper plakat, Betta sp. mahachai). So, plakets are the more common type of dragon scaling you can see on the market, however, there was some inbreeding experienced, to get this line.

So back to the OP question...............a true dragon will have metallic scaling all over, where as a masked scaling dragon may only have some scaling of metallic on a base coating (not to be confused with the actual masked coloring)