How did these dinosaurs—bristling with spikes and plates—go about making more dinosaurs without skewering each other?
Stegosaurus has become an icon of the mystery surrounding dinosaur sex. Dinosaurs must have mated, but just how they did so has puzzled paleontologists for more than 100 years. Lacking much hard evidence, scientists have come up with all kinds of speculations: In his 1906 paper describing Tyrannosaurus rex, for instance, paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn proposed that male tyrant dinosaurs used their minuscule arms for “grasping during copulation.” Others forwarded similar notions about the function of the thumb-spikes on Iguanodon hands. These ideas eventually fell out of favor—perhaps due to embarrassment as much as anything else—but the question remained. How can we study the sex lives of animals that have been dead for millions upon millions of years?
Read the full article over at Smithsonian Mag
If you are particularly interested in animal sex there’s an interesting exhibition featuring plenty of erotic taxidermy over at The Natural History Museum.
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Oh-Eh-Uuhm
I’ve always wondered how dinosaurs ‘did it’. How they got past those great big thick tales & how such huge beasts could take the weight of another one on them, even if for only a few seconds.
I never wanted to ask anyone for fear they would think I was some sort of perv !
I guess we have to wait to unearth kinky dinosaurs that liked to do it in tar pits to know for sure.
Back when I studied animation, some of our grads went on to work on the BBC’s “Walking with Dinosaurs” show.
They told us that the paleontologists brought in to advise couldn’t agree on anything much regarding dinosaur movement so the animators usually just went with their gut instinct.
At one rushes screening one of the animators decided to have a velociraptor kick it’s hind leg up and lick its parts like a dog. The paleontologists were aghast and started giving anatomical rationalisations of why therapods couldn’t do that. The animator had to explain it was put there as a joke.