The role of between-group signalling in the evolution of primate ornamentation

Gregarious mammals interact to varying degrees and in a variety of ways with neighbouring groups. Since navigating this wider social environment via conventional means (social knowledge) may be challenging, we hypothesize that between-group socio-spatial dynamics have exerted strong selection on phenotypic markers of individual identity, quality and competitive ability. Ornaments are sexually selected decorative traits with far-reaching signalling potential. Here, we examined the links between sexual dimorphism in ornamentation, home range use and encounter rates across 144 primate species in a Bayesian framework. We show that home range overlap (shared space among neighbours), an indicator of the complexity of between-group interactions (but not necessarily male-male competition), is positively associated with dimorphism in ornamentation. We find no clear effect for between-group encounter rates. We also find that inter-group interactions were less agonistic when there was greater home..., Raw data were collected from the literature, phylogenetic trees obtained from http://vertlife.org/data/mammals., , # The role of between-group signalling in the evolution of primate ornamentation

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1g1jwsv5g](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.1g1jwsv5g)

This dataset contains information on sexually dimorphic ornaments, social context and between-group behavior across 144 primate species, extracted from the literature and used for phylogenetic comparative analyses.

## Description of the data and file structure

Associated files:

*VertTree_Primates_10k_trees.nex*         10,000 phylogenies for all 317 available primate species, as provided by [http://vertlife.org/data/mammals](http://vertlife.org/data/mammals)

*Data_primate_ornaments.csv*                Data for all species of this study

*Script_primate_ornamentation.R*          R code for the analyses 

Description of variables in data file:

| Column | Description ...