Paleontologists are trying to understand why the fossil record is mostly males

Interesting fact: there’s actually a specific phenomenon in modern-day elephants that explains the idea of males being more reckless. Modern elephant males periodically go through a process called musth . It’s sort of like the male version of going into heat. Their testosterone goes up like 60x and they become aggressive and even violent. They’ll even attack humans and other animals with little warning. A guide at Kruger national park in South Africa mentioned that they once had a spree…

Historically, the typical male had 0 offspring while a minority had many (this was not the case for females). When your median evolutionary outcome is atrocious, you will evolve toward high variance behavior like venturing away from the tribe to explore foreign places. This leads to a higher fraction of male fossils because the preservation of remains is a very unlikely event requiring unusual conditions. "These male mammoths—young, reckless, foolhardy—were just more likely to get into some kind of trouble…

> [Male wooly mammoths] were more likely to do silly things, like die in tar pits Apparently, across many mammalian species, males are more likely to take risks and explore than females. This seems to be good evidence that not all gendered behavior is socialized. That would seem to be a silly straw man argument to knock down, if it were not so widely held.