Monday, June 06, 2005
More horny arthropods!
Yay! The peerless Carl Zimmer has a post running though some of the findings of a recent paper on the evolution of beetle horns.
As I said in the recent trilobite post a lot of beetles sport horns to help them fight off other males in order get access to a mate - a game played throughout the animal kingdom and it seems through out history as well. Zimmer's post explains how evolutionary processes have produced the 'baroque' anatomy one genus of beetle uses to this end. As is often the case it seems that runaway sexual selection is running up against natural selection - big horns win you the right to mate but may well prevent you from living long enough to get the chance. I won't offer any more summary because the post is much more informative than I could hope to be.