I figured I'd take a break from the stupid, bad news of the day, and post about an awesome subject... the first discovery of a dinosaur poophole/peehole/sexhole. Yep, paleontologists have found fossil evidence of a dinosaur cloaca, that Swiss army knife of a hole that birds and crocodilians, the closest living relatives of dinosaurs, use for the elimination bodily wastes and for reproductive purposes.
The cloaca in question belonged to a psittacosaur, a parrot-beaked, hornless relative of the celebrated Triceratops. Paleontologists can even surmise the color of the beasts' hide by studying the shape of melanosomes, which are pigment-bearing cells. Psittacosaurus was determined to be brown, with a lighter underbelly... no technicolor dinosaur here!
The discovery of an impression of a dinosaur cloaca now raises questions about... uhhhhhh... how dinos did it... Some birds just perform a brief cloacal contact to transfer sperm, others have large, alarming dongs that ballistically launch out of the males' cloacas. It's probable that large dinosaurs, had titanic tallywhackers to compensate for their lack of maneuverability during coitus... tortoises have improbably large dicks, one would imagine that similarly encumbered dinosaurs would be just as comically hung. It looks like Chuck Tingle was right all along!
Your mention of tortoise sexual equipment brings to mind the time I stumbled across a pair of dinnerplate-sized tortoises (Or were they turtles? I'm not sure) going at it in a nature museum on Long Island. From my point-of-view, looking down from above, I could not see any cloacas or other sexual equipment. But two things were notable about what I did witness:
ReplyDelete1. It went on. And on. And on. And on. And on. No brief wham, bam, thank-you-m'am for these animals. Eventually, I looked at my watch, realized I would be late for lunch, and reluctantly went on my way while the two critters continued their, uh, liaison.
2. It was noisy as all get out. I don't imagine tortoises have vocal chords or enormous lungs, but there was a loud grunting sound coming from them that like the action itself, went on and on, at about the volume you'd expect from a grunting weight lifter. So what? So multiply what I heard by six feet of Psittacosaurus and you've got such a racket that if there had only been prehistoric cops, they would have been called out on a noise complaint.
Yours crankily,
The New York Crank
I've seen bigass snapping turtles going at it, belly to belly, and rolling, pitching, and yawing in the water. One time, a kid shouted, "Look, those turtles are fighting!" His dad and I had a good laugh.
ReplyDeleteWow.i never thought of them as obligate bipeds. Kinda blows my mind. I always imagined them lumbering along like mini Triceratops. Thank you.
ReplyDeleteCharlie Stross story is relevant.
ReplyDeletehttp://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2013/11/a-likely-tale.html
"Every short story can be improved by adding dinosaurs and sodomy."