The role of sexually dimorphic skin colour and shape in attractiveness of male faces

Evidence for attraction to sexually dimorphic features in male faces is inconsistent in the literature. Mixed results regarding facial masculinity and male attractiveness may arise partly from different influences of face shape and face colouration depending on whether colour was controlled. Recent research suggests that masculinity in face colour, namely darker skin, and femininity in shape are attractive in male faces. Here we examine the influence of sexual dimorphism in skin colour and face shape on attractiveness in 3 experiments. We allowed female participants to manipulate male and female face images along axes of sexual dimorphism in skin colour and/or shape in order to optimise attractiveness. Participants searching for the most attractive appearance chose to masculinise the colour of male faces more than the colour of female faces (although not reaching significance in Experiment 3; p = .16). We found a clear preference for feminine shape in male faces supporting predictions of recent research. These results help to clarify the influence of facial masculinity in women's attractiveness preferences

Amphibians on the hotspot: Molecular biology and conservation in the South American Atlantic Rainforest

Amphibians are the focus of a recent debate and public attention owing to the global decline in their populations worldwide. Amphibians are one of the most threatened and poorly known groups of vertebrates in several geographic areas, even though they play a central role in their own ecosystems. At different levels, amphibians make their contribution to proper ecosystem functioning. They act as regulators of the food web and nutrient cycling, and they also provide several valuable ecosystem services, e.g., as a food source and as animal models for lab research. In this sense, it seems clear that the maintenance of amphibian diversity should be one of the major goals for the several countries where their population decline is observed. However, we are still struggling with the very first step of this process, i.e., the correct identification of the amphibian species diversity. Over the past few decades, research on molecular identification of amphibians using DNA barcoding has encountered some difficulties related to high variability in the mitochondrial genome of amphibians, and a research gap is noticeable in the literature. We herein evaluated both COI and 16S rRNA mitochondrial genes for the molecular identification of frogs and tadpoles in a large fragment of the South American Atlantic Rainforest in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. Our results suggest that both COI and 16S rRNA are informative markers for the molecular identification of the amphibian specimens with all specimens unambiguously identified at the species level. We also made publicly available 12 new sequences of Atlantic Rainforest amphibian species for the first time, and we discussed some conservation issues related to amphibians within the Atlantic Rainforest domains in the state of Rio de Janeiro, Brazil.The authors benefited from grants provided to CFDR (304791/2010-5; 470265/2010- 8 and 302974/2015-6) from Conselho Nacional do Desenvolvimento Cientifico e Tecnologico (CNPq) and through "Cientistas do Nosso Estado" Program from FAPERJ to CFDR (process No. E-26/ 102.765.2012 E-26/202.920.2015). We would like to thank C. Haddad (Universidade Estadual Paulista) and M. L. Lyra (Universidade Estadual Paulista) for some of the specimens and the primers used in the present manuscript and L. A. Fusinatto, who kindly revised the manuscript offering helpful suggestions. FP was supported by the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT) [IF/01356/2012] and Northern Regional Operational Programme (NORTE2020) through the European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) [MARINFO NORTE-01-0145-FEDER- 000031]. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript