Popular theory overstates the importance of the peacocks' most famous attribute, its tail feathers. Photo: TNS
Inside a chain-link-wrapped enclosure on the campus of Texas A&M University, United States, one of the world’s foremost peacock experts has strapped cameras onto the heads of the birds and arrived at a surprising answer to a question that has puzzled scientists since Charles Darwin’s day: What, exactly, is the point of that spectacular plumage?
The conventional wisdom is that the six-foot-high collection of tail feathers evolved to attract the attention of the lady birds.
