By Darren Naish | September 7, 2012 Sexual selection – the
phenomenon in which organisms choose mates on the basis of
desirable traits – is one of the fundamental driving processes
of evolution. It’s all around us, seemingly explains an enormous
amount of the morphological and behavioural variation observed
in the natural world, and has been shown to be tightly linked
with speciation, adaptation, and even the susceptibility of a
species to extinction. Accordingly, it is inherently logical to
assume that sexual selection shaped the evolution of extinct
animals as well as modern ones. The latest contribution on this
subject – that is, on the possible presence of sexually selected
traits in fossil animals – has just been published by Robert
Knell, myself, Joseph Tomkins and Dave Hone in Trends in Ecology
and Evolution (or TREE). The article is only out as a digital
preprint at the moment (Knell et al. 2012). Given that this
article is about fossil animals in general (and not just about
tetrapods) it includes som