Disir
Platinum Member
- Sep 30, 2011
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I'm sitting in Jakob Vinther's office, trying to get my head around whether tyrannosaurs had – there's no easy way to write this – penises. "So somebody has to be…" I stutter, becoming increasingly flustered. "…penetrated", finishes my host matter-of-factly.
We're at the University of Bristol, in the UK, where Vinther is a professor of macroevolution, specialising in the fossil record. I survey the room, mostly to avoid eye contact while I recover. It's exactly what your inner child would hope for from a palaeontologist.
The bookshelves are laden with a kind of fossil lasagne, where layers of academic tomes and paperwork are muddled up with relics from a lost world. Among the highlights are an ancient insect, with its delicate wing veins and mottled colouration clearly visible, the remains of a vampire squid with its black ink sacs so well-preserved they still contain melanin, and strange ancient worms related to those found today on coral reefs. In the corner is an antique wooden chest with drawers that – I hope – contain all kinds of other exciting petrified remains. The place feels like a cross between a museum and a library.
Mere feet away is the star of the show – a psittacosaurus, literally "parrot-lizard". This sweet little beaked herbivore and close relative of the triceratops is thought to have padded through the forests of what is now Asia around 133-120 million years ago. The specimen I'm looking at is world-famous – not for its skin, which is so intact you can still make out the streaky pattern on its body, or for its tail, which includes a distinctive spiky fringe of feathers. No, this dinosaur is best-known as the one that left its bottom behind for future generations to study (More on that later.)
www.bbc.com
Alright, I've not once thought about dinosaur sex. Never. It's so weird.
We're at the University of Bristol, in the UK, where Vinther is a professor of macroevolution, specialising in the fossil record. I survey the room, mostly to avoid eye contact while I recover. It's exactly what your inner child would hope for from a palaeontologist.
The bookshelves are laden with a kind of fossil lasagne, where layers of academic tomes and paperwork are muddled up with relics from a lost world. Among the highlights are an ancient insect, with its delicate wing veins and mottled colouration clearly visible, the remains of a vampire squid with its black ink sacs so well-preserved they still contain melanin, and strange ancient worms related to those found today on coral reefs. In the corner is an antique wooden chest with drawers that – I hope – contain all kinds of other exciting petrified remains. The place feels like a cross between a museum and a library.
Mere feet away is the star of the show – a psittacosaurus, literally "parrot-lizard". This sweet little beaked herbivore and close relative of the triceratops is thought to have padded through the forests of what is now Asia around 133-120 million years ago. The specimen I'm looking at is world-famous – not for its skin, which is so intact you can still make out the streaky pattern on its body, or for its tail, which includes a distinctive spiky fringe of feathers. No, this dinosaur is best-known as the one that left its bottom behind for future generations to study (More on that later.)
The strange search for dinosaur genitals
The sordid details of how dinosaurs had sex have long eluded scientists. Now there's a new idea emerging – could their most eccentric features tell us how they did it?
www.bbc.com
Alright, I've not once thought about dinosaur sex. Never. It's so weird.
