I began my career determined to study extreme weapons, so I set out to find the craziest, most bizarre animals that I could. I also wanted my research to take me someplace exotic. In my case, this meant the tropics, so I narrowed my search. My study animals needed to be easy to find in large numbers, to observe in the wild, and to rear in captivity. As fate would have it, the animals that best fit this bill were dung beetles. I resisted at first. After all, dung beetles lack the panache of elk or moose and, well, they eat dung.

Emlen, Douglas J, Animal Weapons_ The Evoluti…, loc. 4