Welcome to DU!
The truly grassroots left-of-center political community where regular people, not algorithms, drive the discussions and set the standards.
Join the community:
Create a free account
Support DU (and get rid of ads!):
Become a Star Member
Latest Breaking News
Editorials & Other Articles
General Discussion
The DU Lounge
All Forums
Issue Forums
Culture Forums
Alliance Forums
Region Forums
Support Forums
Help & Search
Thanks to a new fossil discovery, we suddenly know a lot more about dinosaur sex
(Salon) No one predicted that January 2021 would be a banner month for dinosaur news. Last week an article in the scholarly journal Cretaceous Research revealed that dinosaur bones in Argentina may have belonged to a creature so massive that it would have been the largest land animal know to have existed. Now a study published in the journal Current Biology gives us an up close look at these animals — namely, at their butts.
A team of scientists from the University of Bristol and the University of Massachusetts Amherst revealed that they had discovered and described in detail a dinosaur's cloaca — that is, a vent in the animal's posterior that would have been the dinosaur's equivalent of an anus, urethra and genitalia — based on a fossil that had distinctly preserved the skin patterns of a Psittacosaurus, a dog-sized dinosaur related to the Triceratops. Unlike bones, soft tissue does not usually preserve well over millions of years; hence, lacking any preserved organs or skin tissue, much of dinosaur anatomy and behavior has been a mystery. That makes this discovery of a cloaca a genuinely interesting clue that tells us more about dinosaur behavior, including mating.
"The cloaca is a multi-purpose opening that is used for everything that you do opposite of your mouth: peeing, pooping, having sex, laying eggs," Dr. Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol, told Salon. "Most of these animals have penises, except for some of the dinosaurs' descendants. Amongst birds you don't find penises so often. They do something else called cloacal kissing, where they basically put their cloacal openings up against each other and then they just vibrate until some sperm is released and that is absorbed by the female's cloaca. The question is, what would dinosaurs be doing?"
Until recently, paleontologists could only guess. ..............(more)
https://www.salon.com/2021/01/21/thanks-to-a-new-fossil-discovery-we-suddenly-know-a-lot-more-about-dinosaur-sex/
19 replies
= new reply since forum marked as read
= new reply since forum marked as read
