The tips of the outer tail feathers of a male king bird-of-paradise, A male plum-throated cotinga, and the Yellow plumes from a male lesser bird-of-paradise.
How Beauty Is Making Scientists Rethink Evolution. The extravagant splendor of the animal kingdom can’t be explained by natural selection alone — so how did it come to be?
Perhaps no living scientist is as enthusiastic — or doctrinaire — a champion of Darwinian sexual selection as Richard Prum, an evolutionary ornithologist at Yale University. In May 2017, he published a book, “The Evolution of Beauty,” that lucidly and passionately explains his personal theory of aesthetic evolution.
Prum helped confirm that feathers evolved in dinosaurs long before the emergence of birds, and he became one of the first scientists to deduce the colors of a dinosaur’s plumage by examining pigment molecules preserved in fossilized feathers. All the while, he never stopped thinking about sexual selection.
Photo Credit Kenji Aoki for The New York Times
via: The New York Times - Read full article here