Hunting Knocks Bighorns Down a Little

Trophy-hunting has taken an evolutionary toll on Canada’s bighorn sheep, scientists say. Their horns are getting smaller because the biggest rams with the most impressive examples are being shot before they have mated and passed on their genes, said biologist Curtis Strobek, of the University of Alberta in Canada.

Strobek and his colleagues studied 30 years of data on bighorn sheep from a population at Ram Mountain in Alberta. They also warned that there could be a similar evolutionary effect on elephants in Africa, where tuskless males are becoming more common.