Well the first basic idea I had was to study a little bit more on Homo Ebonies since some breeders say that homozygotes mature much slower than other colors, hetero ebony not being affected.
I've seen a lot of that research and considered it, but I don't think they will count pure data mining as the research they're looking for. I didn't want to be too specific and potentially confuse anyone. Gene knockout experiments are pretty expensive although I do believe there is still a professor who specializes in transgenic mice; if so I plan on talking to him. Some ideas could be diseases (this could go into things like SNPs, etc), evolutionary ideas (like why they have long tails), even behavioral things would be okay. Messing with live chins would be almost impossible since they are not only expensive but I just couldn't do it! Genetics wise, I could ask chinparents to send in poop and extract DNA to study. I'll try to think of more ideas I just figured I'd ask now and really focus on it after all these midterms:)