Monday, February 18, 2008
Hey, it's from the New York Times!
I would like to direct your attention to this article from the New York Times (webpage, of course). Back by unpopular demand (crackle with evil laughter)Excerpt:
...In doing so, he founded one of the most important and successful branches of evolutionary research. We now have a robust understanding of how sexual pressures — the pressures to find, impress, and seduce a mate — influence the evolution of males and females. So much so that if you tell me a fact, such as the average size difference between males and females in a species, or the proportion of a male’s body taken up by his testes, I can tell you what the mating system is likely to be. For example, where males are much bigger than females, fighting between males has been important — which often means that the biggest males maintain a harem. If testes are relatively large, females probably have sex with several males in the course of a single breeding episode.
These forces are so reliable that, if only we could determine the sex of dinosaur fossils, we could begin to infer their mating habits. But alas. Unless the animal died while heavy with eggs, as one oviraptor obligingly did, determining the sex of a dinosaur is close to impossible. At one point, it was thought that the shape of a particular bone at the base of the tail might indicate sex; but a recent analysis has shown it does not. Now the best guesses come from subtle differences in structure of the bone in the hind legs. For the time being, then, fossils are stonily silent about the dinosaurs’ private lives, their methods of wooing, the exuberance of their song-and-dance routines.
Which brings me to my tyrannical fantasy. I want to take a journey 68 million years back in time to see a Tyrannosaurus rex couple mating. What was it like? Did they trumpet and bellow and stamp their feet? Did they thrash their enormous tails? Did he bite her neck in rapture and exude a musky scent? Somehow, I imagine that when two T. rex got it on, the earth shook for miles around.
And if I could only take this journey, I could answer a question that sometimes bothers me. Did T. rex have a penis? Did he even, as lizards do, have two?...
For those of you who are wondering why this is here, we (or rather I) talked about it during lunch. And this is also to prove to Lih Wei that this article actually existed and I'm not talking crap. But most importantly the article is here because......I can......
(oh and the webpage have a skeleton of the T-rex)
