Get out of your chair and go look at some animals behaving. I hope that spring is in the air so that you can see animals courting and mating. Look at insects, birds, mammals, or reptiles. Go to the beach and look at the fiddler crabs. So sad if the dead of winter has set in and animals aren’t engaged in mating rituals. Look at fish in an aquarium. Go to a tropical fish store and look at a tank ...

Decorative architectural ornaments are the mainstay of several art forms. Islamic architecture had properties and characteristics, including non-depiction living beings emulating God's creation wrongdoing. Therefore, floral, geometrical, vegetal motifs became main component ornaments. Similarly, Palmette is included practiced on a large scale in due to its or floral This article focuses histori...

The last decade has witnessed considerable theoretical and empirical investigation of how male sexual ornaments evolve. This strong male-biased perspective has resulted in the relative neglect of variation in female mate preferences and its consequences for ornament evolution. As sexual selection is a co-evolutionary process between males and females, ignoring variation in females overlooks a k...

A central assumption in evolutionary biology is that females of sexually dimorphic species suffer costs when bearing male secondary sexual traits, such as ornamentation. Nevertheless, it is common in nature to observe females bearing rudimentary versions of male ornaments (e.g. 'bearded ladies'), as ornaments can be under similar genetic control in both sexes. Here, we provide evidence that mas...

The fitness of male guppies (Poecilia reticulata) highly depends on the size and number of their black, blue, and orange ornaments. Recently, progress has been made regarding the genetic mechanisms underlying male guppy pigment pattern formation, but we still know little about the pigment cell organization within these ornaments. Here, we investigate the pigment cell distribution within the bla...

The elaboration and diversification of sexually selected weapons remain poorly understood. We argue that progress in this topic has been hindered by a strong bias in sexual selection research, and a tendency for weapons to be conflated with ornaments used in mate choice. Here, we outline how male-male competition and female choice are distinct mechanisms of sexual selection, and why weapons and...

The later Pleistocene archaeological record of southernmost Africa encompasses several Middle Stone Age industries and the transition to the Later Stone Age. Through this period various signs of complex human behaviour appear episodically, including elaborate lithic technologies, osseous technologies, ornaments, motifs and abstract designs. Here we explore the regional archaeological record usi...