Dino Sex

It may not have happened in lakes but it certainly did happen - so how? Let’s dive into fossilized cloacas, theoretical genitals, and the impracticalities of sexing a dinosaur.

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CW: sexual content, genitalia, brief discussions of nonconsensual sex between animals, Nanotyrannus, making fun of old white men

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References

Kelly 2013 penile anatomy and hypotheses of erectile function in the american alligator https://anatomypubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1002/ar.22644#:~:text=Thus%2C%20unlike%20other%20amniotes%2C%20alligators,and%20retracted%20at%20its%20completion.

Black, Riley. "The Anatomy of Dinosaur Sex." https://www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/the-anatomy-of-dinosaur-sex-95156234/

Sanger, T. J., Gredler, M. L., & Cohn, M. J. (2015). Resurrecting embryos of the tuatara, Sphenodon punctatus, to resolve vertebrate phallus evolution. Biology letters, 11(10), 20150694.

Norell, M. A., Wiemann, J., Fabbri, M., Yu, C., Marsicano, C. A., Moore-Nall, A., ... & Zelenitsky, D. K. (2020). The first dinosaur egg was soft. Nature, 583(7816), 406-410.

Dhiman, H., Verma, V., & Prasad, G. V. (2022). First ovum-in-ovo pathological titanosaurid egg throws light on the reproductive biology of sauropod dinosaurs. Scientific Reports, 12(1), 9362.

Mallon, J. C. (2017). Recognizing sexual dimorphism in the fossil record: lessons from nonavian dinosaurs. Paleobiology, 43(3), 495-507.