IT WAS one of the many mysteries pondered by Darwin: why do some female animals have horns? Horns on cloven-hooved mammals are thought to have evolved for fighting each other, but most female cattle and deer don’t do this.
Now of the University of Massachusetts and from the University of California, Davis, have a solution. They noted the presence or absence of horns in 117 species of bovid and set up competing mathematical models to examine whether evolution of horns was likely to have been driven by body size, openness of habitat, territorial behaviour, group…
