For Birds-of-Paradise, Being Hot Is Not Enough to Win a Mate, They Must Also Have The Moves

For birds-of-paradise, physical and vocal traits and behaviors evolve together, which is contrary to what we think we are seeing for most songbirds

Adult male Wilson’s bird-of-paradise, Diphyllodes respublica. This is one of 39 (or so) species of passerine birds in the taxonomic family Paradisaeidae. This species courts females on the forest floor.
(Credit: Tim Laman, with kind permission.)

“After centuries of mistraining about how we should think about the process of evolution, it is still hard for people to see the obvious when it is staring right at them,” observed evolutionary ornithologist Richard Prum, Professor of Ornithology, and Head Curator of Vertebrate Zoology at the Peabody Museum of Natural History at Yale University, when I asked him to comment on this new study.

“There are no rules to beauty.”