courtship

Paul Auster serves up more metafiction, and from Christopher Buckley comes a farce about the American judicial system.

When a young gene known as sphinx is inactivated in the common fruit fly, it leads to increased male-male courtship.

Such behavior is widespread in many fly species, but not in Drosophila melanogaster, which has the sphinx gene.

Other fly species do not. When two D. melanogaster males that lack the sphinx gene are put together, they court each other.

After half a century of debate, researchers have confirmed that dome-headed dinosaurs called pachycephalosaurs could collide with each other during courtship combat.

Some researchers have suggested that pachycephalosaur domes, which ranged from one to 20 centimetres thick, enabled head-butting contests as a way to attract mates, similar to the contests bighorn sheep engage in today.

After half a century of debate, a University of Alberta researcher has confirmed that dome-headed dinosaurs called pachycephalosaurs could collide with each other during courtship combat.