Sexual selection and species recognition promote complex male courtship displays in ungulates

Identifying the evolutionary drivers of sexual signal complexity is a key challenge in the study of animal communication. Among mammals, male bovids and cervids often perform elaborate gestural displays during courtship, consisting of ritualized movements of various parts of the body but the causes underlying interspecific variation in complexity of such displays remain poorly understood. Here we apply the comparative method to investigate which factors may have either promoted or constrained gestural repertoire size. 
We found that sexual selection was a strong predictor of gestural display complexity in male bovids and cervids. Repertoire size was positively correlated with breeding group size, an indicator of the intensity of sexual selection on males. Moreover, repertoires were larger in species adopting non-territorial and lek breeding mating systems than in species adopting resource-defence territoriality, a finding that can be explained by more emphasis on direct benefits than in..., Scoring gestural display complexity as the response variable
Data on gestural courtship displays of bovids and cervids were collected from peer-reviewed publications and scientific books in English, French, German, Italian, and Spanish (data sources listed in Appendix II). We only considered descriptions that detailed full courtship behavior sequences leading to copulation and excluded sources which only mentioned specific displays without describing an entire courtship sequence. This resulted in a dataset of 73 out of 136 bovid species and 21 out of 47 cervid species. Although we failed to find descriptions of courtship behavior for some species, the dataset is representative of the overall diversity in that it includes at least one species from each genus, except for the poorly studied monospecific genus Pseudoryx (Bininda-Emonds et al. 2007). Domesticated species were excluded from the study because human intervention is likely to have modified their behavioral traits. 
We used the r..., , # SEXUAL SELECTION AND SPECIES RECOGNITION PROMOTE COMPLEX MALE COURTSHIP DISPLAYS IN UNGULATES

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.msbcc2g5s](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.msbcc2g5s)

## Description of the data and file structure

Identifying the evolutionary drivers of sexual signal complexity is a key challenge in the study of animal communication. Among mammals, male bovids and cervids often perform elaborate gestural displays during courtship, consisting of ritualized movements of various parts of the body but the causes underlying interspecific variation in complexity of such displays remain poorly understood. Here we apply the comparative method to investigate which factors may have either promoted or constrained gestural repertoire size.

We found that sexual selection was a strong predictor of gestural display complexity in male bovids and cervids. Repertoire size was positively correlated with breeding group size, an indicator of the intensity of sexual selection on males. Moreove...