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Published January 12, 2024
Nature scenes get no more iconic than a ram crashing down upon his rival with huge, curving horns that can weigh 30 pounds apiece, right?
Can you close your eyes and hear the clang of bucks tangling their tines in a dark wood, or have you ever felt awe upon seeing the whopping, six-foot-long antlers of a fully grown bull moose? Well, you’re not alone.
Humans have been fascinated with heavily armed animals for the longest time. Some of the oldest art ever found depicts the horns of an ancient water buffalo and the tusks of a boar, each etched into the walls of caves some 44,000 and 45,500 years ago, respectively.
(This ancient cave art may depict the world’s oldest hunting scene.)
However, maybe our obsession over the majesty of antlers, horns, and tusks is preventing us from seeing the wonder of what’s happening in the opposite sex.
In fact, a study published today in the journal Behavioral Ecology and Sociobiology provides the first evidence that, as male mammals evolve larger weapons for combat and to signal their fitness, the females of those species develop larger brains than expected.
Lead author of the study, Nicole Lopez, a Ph.D. student at the University of Montana, says, “I think that the females are a really important aspect of biology that often gets overlooked, because usually they appear drab, or dull, or they’re not as elaborate [as males].”
Not to take anything away from the males, the study doesn’t suggest that larger weapons necessarily translate to lower intelligence for them.
“It’s not that as males invest more on their weapons, they get dumber,” says Ted Stankowich, an evolutionary behavioral ecologist at California State University Long Beach and senior author of the study.
Rather, male brain sizes appear to stay the same even as evolution appears to select for larger and larger headgear.
This study upends what we thought about how much agency female animals have in choosing a mate. It remains unclear if these traits are directly linked—which would tell us a lot more. The study shows that they are indeed correlated.
This groundbreaking research gathered data from seven museums to measure the skulls, brain volume, and weapon sizes of 413 specimens from 29 species of ungulate.