‘Badasses of the mountains’: goats clash with sheep as key US glaciers melt

Climate crisis may explain fights as disappearing ice fuels interspecies competition - with goats nearly always winning

In one corner, there is the agile climber with steak knife-like horns. In the other is America's largest wild sheep. They are locked in significantly one-sided combat in the mountains of the US west, scientists have found, in a battle over resources uncovered by the region's vanishing glaciers.

In study sites across a 1,500-mile span of the Rocky Mountains, scientists have documented mountain goats and bighorn sheep competing over mineral deposits among the rocks, at elevations of up to 14,000ft.