Pod Insights Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society Sex Lives of Dinosaurs About this episode What's the dinosaur equivalent of Netflix and chill? Were they capable of flirting?
In today's episode, Kate speaks with Dr. David Hone, author of Uncovering Dinosaur Behaviour: What They Did And How We Know https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691215914/uncovering-dinosaur-behavior?srsltid=AfmBOopVa7IYx9RH-KtgWGGKwcHQmMlmJOccR9F1ahNQ3KvXDx-0PFGZ, to find out more about how different dinosaurs might have had sex.
Could the T-Rex's little arms aid their sexual performance? How did they penetrate through so much heavy protective armour? And were they monogamous?
This episode was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.
All music from Epidemic Sounds/All3 Media.
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1:32 Kate Lister? Hello, my lovely Betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. You are listening to Betwixt the Sheets. And because we are a naughty podcast discussing naughtiness throughout history, I have to give you the fair do's warning, because, well then, fair do's, you were warned. And here it is. This is an adult podcast, spoken by adults to other adults about naughty things in an naughty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. So this is your chance to get out now, while you still can. And for the rest of you, let's crack on.
2:01 Kate Lister? Tread very carefully, betwixtins, and keep your voice down. We are deep in what will one day be Midwest America some eighty million years ago. I'm doing my best David Attenborough impression, because somewhere around here, I'm trying to find out how the T-Rex had sex. Don't you giggle, this is serious scientific work, I swear.
2:26 Kate Lister? We could be close. I'm dying to find out if their tiny arms helped or hindered their sex lives. Certainly, it was gonna be no use in putting on a dino condom. Are you curious to hear more about how the dinosaurs did it? Well, stick around with me and we'll find out.
2:54 Speaker 03 What do you call a man?
2:55 Speaker 04 Oh, money, of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I need perfect copies of whatever my boss needs by just turning enough and pushing the button.
3:11 Speaker 03 Yes, social courtesy does make a difference.
3:14 Speaker 05 Goodness, what a beautiful man! Goodness has nothing to do with it, darling.
3:22 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome back to Betwix the Sheets: The History of Sex Scandal in Society, with me, Kate Lister. Something you never saw in the Jurassic Park films, as far as I remember, is dinosaurs actually having sex. There was that whole asexual reproduction, there were some eggs, and there was something about tree sap and a mosquito? But nobody was actually getting down and dirty, unless I missed an extra on the DVD. But obviously dinosaurs were doing it for like millions upon millions of years. So, what might that have looked like? How did they overcome their huge physiques and thick armour? How do you have sex when your neck is as long as a diplodocus?
4:04 Kate Lister? Or you're as spiny as a stegosaurus? I'm not good with dinosaur names. But somebody who is, is the fantastic Dr David Hohn of Queen Mary's University, London, and he is going to tell us how the dinosaurs did it. And if this crossover of science and sex history tickles your fancy, why not have a scroll back and listen to an episode from the start of last year on the ancient origins of sex? Fossil brushes in the ready, Betwixters, let's do this.
4:38 Kate Lister? Hello and welcome to Betwix the Sheets. It's only Dave Hohn, how are you doing?
4:44 Speaker 06 All right, thank you. Teaching is finished for the year, so that always puts me in a slightly better mood. Yeah, finished on Friday.
4:49 Kate Lister? Well, thank you very much for taking any of your precious time out to come and talk to us about dinosaur sex.
4:56 Speaker 06 I'm always happy to talk about dinosaurs. Sometimes sex comes up, so it's not a natural combination.
5:03 Kate Lister? Obviously, they were having sex, but this is not something I have ever spent much time thinking about, so I'm thrilled to be talking to you about this. I have so many questions and they're probably going to be really stupid ones, too.
5:17 Speaker 06 I mean, to be clear, I haven't spent that much time thinking about it either. But probably more than you, but I don't want to give the impression that this is a regular afternoon for me.
5:31 Kate Lister? So, so tell me first, what is your area of expertise? And what period of history are we thinking of here? Because dinosaur encompasses so much.
5:42 Speaker 06 Right, so, I mean, the first thing to do, we need to get clear for people who don't realise, is to get rid of birds, because birds are literally dinosaurs. So we mean all the classic dinosaurs that people would think of. Tyrannosaurus, Stegosaurus, Triceratops, Stiplodocus, et cetera, but somewhat artificially excluding birds as their direct descendants. So I work on non-avian dinosaurs and some other groups as well. I also do quite a lot on pterosaurs, the flying reptiles that are also not dinosaurs that lived alongside them.
6:11 Kate Lister? Why are they not dinosaurs?
6:13 Speaker 06 In the same way that we are not elephants.
6:17 Speaker 06 So, sorry, that's, that's, that's an annoyingly pretentious answer, but we're relatively closely related to each other. We're both mammals, but one group is primates and the other group isn't. So they are not dinosaurs because they're a different... Different evolutionary ancestry, even though they're close relatives.
6:33 Kate Lister? Right, okay, I'm with you. Okay, yeah.
6:35 Speaker 06 Yes, dinosaurs, oldest dinosaurs are somewhere around 230 ish million years old. And then they go extinct 65.5 million years ago, brackets, except birds. So we're talking about a span of 180 ish million years.
6:50 Kate Lister? Wow, I mean, I, I speak to historians who's specialist is like one month in France in the 18th century. That's a hundred million years.
7:00 Speaker 06 No, 180 million years, you can, that's quite a lot, you can nearly double that. Yes, and worldwide distribution as well.
7:07 Kate Lister? Oh my God, I have recently discovered that maybe all of the dinosaurs weren't around at the same time as each other. Is that true?
7:16 Speaker 06 Absolutely not in any way, shape or form, in the same way that we don't have animals and saber-toothed tigers now.
7:21 Kate Lister? Yeah, I knew that.
7:21 Speaker 06 But you know, you have faunal turnovers. We think most species, there's a kind of general average and it's a very loose average with huge extremes either side, but a regular species might last two or three million years. Which means every few million years, there are not many things around now that were around, you know, five million years ago. So yeah, when you've got a span of 180 million, you know, dozens of completely different faunas.
7:51 Kate Lister? So is it, was like T. rex around at the same time as, as the diplodocus?
7:57 Speaker 06 No, so, so this, this is the classic one that you actually see as a meme. So diplodocus is around about the same time as stegosaurus. So there is less time between us and T. rex than T. rex and diplodocus and stegosaurus. By about like 20 million years as well, it's not even close. I'd have to double check the exact numbers. Dinosaurs were around for a really long time and people just don't get it.
8:21 Kate Lister? Really long time.
8:22 Speaker 06 Yeah, if you're not used to, it, it boggles me. My dad always used to ask like, how do you deal with these kinds of numbers? And the truth is you don't really, you just kind of use them because that, that's what they are. But in terms of like, can I mentally handle what three million years might actually look like? No, I've been doing this for decades and I still can't wrap my head around it. It's just such an absurdly unhuman timescale to even begin to think about.
8:48 Kate Lister? And just for context, how long have humans been around for?
8:52 Speaker 06 It depends how you define humans. So, early members of the hominid lineage are at least five million years old. I think the genus Homo is something like 1.5 when you're getting into Homo sapiens, our species, something like about 300,000. And then modern humans, so Homo sapiens sapiens, our subspecies, what we'd call anatomically modern humans, something like, you know, 20 or 30,000, or maybe 40 or 50,000. We're very, very, very, very new indeed, whichever way you cut it.
9:25 Kate Lister? It's not 180 million years, is it?
9:27 Speaker 06 No.
9:29 Kate Lister? The first thing is, some, I don't, I'm very impressed with dinosaurs, but there is a kind of narrative around them that they were a failed species. But you can't be a failure as a species if you've been...
9:40 Speaker 06 I mean, yeah, that's a classic Victorian argument, because obviously, humans, humans needed to be superior in some way, shape or form, because obviously we're best, because we can think and do other things. And Douglas Adams, they make digital watches. But yeah, dinosaurs were famously unsuccessful because they were only around for 180 million years. And then again, in birds, you can add the last 65 million years on top of that. And then, you know, there's only 11,000 species of birds alive now, which is getting on for twice as many mammals. So obviously dinosaurs are spectacularly unsuccessful.
10:14 Kate Lister? Well, they are, they are very, very successful. And one of the ways that they are able to be successful is they must have been having sex. What kind of sex would dinosaurs have? That's a huge question. That's far too big.
10:28 Speaker 06 I mean, the truth is, I mean, in terms of like, straight up active copulation, we really can't say very much at all, beyond the fact that almost certainly all of them were doing it. There's at least a possibility we had asexual species. There are a handful. So there's various lizards and snakes which are capable of asexual reproduction. There's two, if not three, birds we've observed doing it. So it's very, very rare in birds, but it does turn up. And even those, I think they're all facultative. So, in other words, this is something they can do, but it is not what they habitually do.
11:02 Kate Lister? An asexual reproduction is where you can produce an offspring where you haven't had sex at all?
11:07 Speaker 06 Basically, yes. And that's really common in lots of invertebrates and lots of amoeba. And there's quite a few fish and things like this that do it and bacteria. But once you're into the invertego, it's kind of higher vertebrates. Once you're into lizards, reptiles, mammals, birds, it's fairly rare. But yeah, as I say, there's a couple of birds that can do it. So it would be weird if dinosaurs couldn't do it. And this is one of those big things, going back to that like age issue. When we say kind of like, did dinosaurs do X? The answer is almost always yes, because if you've got a lineage that was around for 180 million years and probably produced hundreds of thousands of species in that time, almost certainly one of them somewhere could do it. The question is, do you know which ones? And do you have any evidence for it?
11:51 Speaker 06 And that's when things start falling down very rapidly. So yeah, dinosaurs must have had sex. Otherwise, there wouldn't have been little dinosaurs, certainly not for a very long period of time. And that means they must physically have had sex. Once you get past amphibians, reptiles, birds and mammals, so a group called the amniotes, they all have internal fertilization. So you do not have the frog egg thing of, you know, females laying eggs and males just sticking sperm onto them. Something has to basically go into something else, or at least physically contact it to do an internal sperm transfer. So dinosaurs were doing that. And then the real question starts to become, well, how? Because while there's lots of them that probably wouldn't have any obvious problems at all,
12:35 Speaker 06 they're no less oddly built than many birds or reptiles or crocodilians, for example. You get things like the really big sauropod, so the long-necked, long-tailed diplodocus-like thing. The really big ones of them are weighing 50 plus, 5O plus, tonnes. Getting them together is going to be interesting. You have something like Tyrannosaurus, where the upper estimates are nine tonnes, but it's a biped, you know, a kind of horizontally standing biped. There's not a very obvious way of getting the two necessary bits together.
13:08 Kate Lister? No.
13:08 Speaker 06 A third, then, you have the Ankylosaurus, the armoured dinosaurs with the clubed tails. Their whole body is like a sheet of solid, bony armour, and they have weirdly, actually, very wide pelvises. So as in, it's a squat animal that's standing on all fours, but the back end of it is really, really wide whilst not being very high.
13:27 Kate Lister? Still.
13:28 Speaker 06 And then a stiff tail with bony armour all the way down it, and a body that's got bony armour all the way down it. They're not like the most agile, able, running around, jumpy, flexible animals that probably, the big ones probably weigh, you know, five, six, seven tonnes. How are you getting, you know, to take the Ikea approach, how are you getting tab A into slot B?
13:50 Kate Lister? Carefully, with a lot of lube, I think.
13:54 Speaker 06 Well, it's more the physically, how do you get into position? And of course, the really obvious answer to this is a very long tab A. And this does turn up in various things. So I will very quickly name drop, I was on Joe Marler's podcast when this came up, explosively inflating duck penises, are a thing. Okay, you've covered them. But you can have a phallus that is as long, if not longer than the actual animal that holds it. So this is the kind of thing, we don't know. This-
14:22 Kate Lister? Yeah, but they all say that, don't they?
14:24 Speaker 06 Right. We do get soft tissue, you know, we do get skin, we do get bits of muscle, claws, there's stains of eyeballs, there's an alleged fossil brain and fossil heart and various other bits and bob. So soft tissue does preserve, it's just very, very, very, very rare. But something like this is probably not ever going to preserve, but the odds of us ever finding one are very, very, very, very, very remote. So if they exist, and then if we find one, it would still only tell you about one species.
14:57 Kate Lister? But wait, wait, wait, just a sec, just a sec. The missing link here, like the theory is that some of them at least must have had a huge penis, but we don't know that because it's, it didn't survive.
15:11 Speaker 06 Well, yeah, it won't preserve. Yeah, it will, it will be- Very soft squidgy tissue because there's going to be a lot of blood or lymph or something else that's inflating it. So even if it happened to be at maximum size at the time the animal died, it's all going to dry out and shrink. You get lots of that, you know, you get this mummification where the skin shrinks as the whole animal dies up. You know, you occasionally see photos on the internet of like, you know, we found a cat stuck in the floorboards or something like this, you know, they're all dried up and shrunk. That's what you'll find. We get those for dinosaurs where they had mummified and dried out before they were fossilized. So yeah, will we ever find one? And even if we did, if miraculously tomorrow, we do have these sites of exceptional preservation in China, Canada, Germany, and a couple of others. If you suddenly found a
15:56 Speaker 06 perfect dinosaur with a penis or equivalent preserved, unless it happens to be out and obvious, would you even know what it was? Because that's not usually how these sit, they sit internally in these animals. And then unless it was something like one of the giant sauropods or one of the armored ankylosaurus, they probably didn't need a large one, in which case you're not actually going to see it. One of the things we rely on a lot with paleontology, or at least for vertebrate paleontology, is what we call osteological correlates. So that is something in the bone, the osteology which correlates with a soft tissue structure. I mean, a pretty obvious one is eyeballs. You have a hole in the bone and that's where your eyeballs sit.
16:36 Kate Lister? And some penises do have bones in them.
16:39 Speaker 06 So the mammalian baculum, yes, which turns up in lots of things, including primates, but weirdly not us, which is, has all kinds of interesting biological implications in its own right. But that's very much a mammalian thing. So, and even then, it's, it's, I'm trying to remember the acronym. So primates, rodents, what were insectivores, so hedgehogs and some other relatives, bats, carnivorans, and I believe there's one rabbit, well, technically a pike or a legomorph. So those are the groups that have them. But there's all kinds of others that don't.
17:10 Kate Lister? There's, there's an acronym for animals that have got bones in their penises?
17:15 Speaker 06 Yes, the acronym used to be, so this is, this is the problem with taxonomy. So there's, there used to be a mammalian group called Insectivora. We've now recognized that that's not a true evolutionary group. That was several other groups artificially welded together. So the acronym was Primata, primates, Rodentia, rodents, Insectivora, Chiroptera, which is the bats, and Carnivora, P R I C C. The mammals with a baculum were pricks.
17:44 Speaker 06 And that's how you remembered. Unfortunately, Insectivora doesn't exist and now there's a Legomorph, so it doesn't work very well.
17:51 Kate Lister? Damn it. All right, but that's, that's an amazing fact to know. But dinosaurs, no, they were unlikely to have had bones in their penises because they're not mammals.
18:02 Speaker 06 As I say, it's only in certain mammal groups. There's no bird, no crocodile, no reptile that I know of that has ones. And, and don't forget, we have hundreds of very, very good, exceptionally preserved, complete and articulated dinosaur skeletons. If this was present, we'd have found one by now. In fact, we'd have found lots. So it's just not going to be there. But going back to what I was saying, what we can find though is, are there corals? So for example, if you, you know, there are certain rough patches on bones that correspond to certain muscle groups or certain ligaments. So if, for example, you had something like that in all the ducks and all the other animals that had a particularly large one,
18:42 Speaker 06 that then had to articulate or in some way connect to the bones, maybe you could get that signal, but that doesn't appear to be the case. So we really are left with the case of this would just be a soft tissue thing. And so if the preservation was good enough to preserve that, it's also going to preserve viscera and lungs and, you know, liver and kidneys and all the other bits and all the goo of the body, in which case you probably wouldn't be able to tell anyway. So this is one of those things where we're left with inferences. And so people say, oh, you're just guessing. And it's like, well, we're not, but we can look at ankylosaurs and they, you know, they weigh twice as much as an elephant, whilst being half as high and three times as wide and covered in bony armour.
19:27 Speaker 06 If you can think of another way you can get them together without this, I'm intrigued to know what it is. Cause no one's thought of one in certainly a good 20 or 30 years of serious thought about this.
19:40 Kate Lister? So when you're working with these kinds of sources, and I suppose it is, it's mostly fossilized remains that you're working with. How are you able to extract information about the kind of sex? Because it's not just they must have had an enormous retractable penis. There's also things like this was penetrative, that wasn't. What kind of position would they have had? Even if you've got a penis that you can reach somebody from the other side of the room, there's still a question of positions and things. How do you go about determining something like that?
20:09 Speaker 06 It's a lot of inference and a lot of, you know, what is definitely possible and what is definitely impossible. So for example, they could have had external fertilization. You know, we, there's things like newts and salamanders where the male will basically drop a packet of sperm on the ground and then the female will bend over or scratch out and basically suck it up. Maybe they did that, but it would be very, very odd. You know, this is something that this evolutionary group left miles behind. It's never reappeared. You know, it, we can't rule it out, but it seems so incredibly unlikely.
20:43 Kate Lister? Okay.
20:44 Speaker 06 I think you can effectively dismiss it, but you know, there is a possibility, for example. I mean, the first thing you can do is just do the sort of reconstructions that we do do anyway. When you see something like Jurassic Park films, we're doing stuff like that in as much as we can scan the 3D preserved skeletons, we can digitally re-articulate them, we can use those osteological correlates and compare them to modern birds to work out where the muscles go and how big those muscles would be and rebuild the body. We can look at the flexibility of joints and how strong the ligaments are because there's osteological correlates for ligamentous attachments and things like this and go, right, this leg could probably flex this much in this orientation and that much in that orientation. And this leg can, you know, the thigh bone can take this much strain and we think the
21:29 Speaker 06 animal weighed this much. And then you can try and work out, well, can I physically get a T-Rex leg over the leg or back of another one? Well, actually not really, or yes, you can.
21:40 Kate Lister? Let's talk T-Rex because looking at their.
21:44 Kate Lister? Quite famous shape and quite famous frame. These tiny little hands, like how, they must be like those weebel things that we had as kids, where they just like, there's nothing, if they slip over, that's that. So how are they having, they can't even grab on to each other's hair with that. Like, what are they doing?
22:01 Speaker 06 There was an idea in, I think, the early nineties where someone basically said, oh, this is, this is a mating thing. The reason T-Rex didn't get rid of their arms entirely is this is important for the male to hold on to the female, which is absolute nonsense, frankly. A T-Rex's arm is about the same size and proportion as mine. I've got a, not on me, but I've got a cast of a T-Rex arm. And if I put it alongside mine, it's surprisingly similar size and shape. A big T-Rex weighed seven plus tonnes, up to nine tonnes. I am not going to be able to hold the weight of nine tonnes if you slip. Not even half a tonne. So let's, let's just rule that out. But again, there's, you look at, you know, what is potentially mechanically, physically
22:44 Speaker 06 possible, because of course they don't have to stand up and get into some kind of Kama Sutra position. You know, the female could lie down on the floor and lift her tail up as far as possible. The male could stand half sideways and crouch down or something like this. You can get the two back ends together, probably quite closely for even animals that size. And as I say, in a bunch of birds, you know, do, effectively do not have penetrative sex. So I should say, birds and reptiles and amphibians and fish. Again, mammals are weird. We, we always think of mammals as being the norm and for, of course, for a lot of things we're not. So they have a single exit where everything comes out or potentially goes in called the cloaca.
23:26 Kate Lister? Right.
23:26 Speaker 06 And then in birds, they have what's called a cloacal kiss. So literally the male cloaca and the female cloaca basically meet and the sperm is just pushed across that gap. But you don't actually need to push anything physically internal. So it, for a lot of dinosaurs, I'm sure that was pretty much it. You know, there's lots of small species or lots of ones that were relatively agile or relatively flexible. And therefore that's going to be the limit of it. You, you just need to get close enough for The two bits to to connect. But once you start getting into, yeah, the armored stuff, the very heavy stuff or the really heavy bipeds.
24:03 Kate Lister? Yeah.
24:03 Speaker 06 Well, that's probably gonna be you again, you know, there's there's no obvious solutions to this. There have been a handful, and it is a handful, like two or three scientific papers where people have tried to work out li- literally sex positions with really well made articulated toys, because there are some really good ones out there, or very well articulated models, and just trying to work out, well, just how far can we push those flexibilities? Now we're doing that with digital models, but it's functionally the same thing, you know, what bits can you get where and how close can you get them together? And then coupled with, well, what behaviors do we see in living species? What do birds have to do? What do crocodiles have to do?
24:49 Kate Lister? I'll be back with David after this short break.
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28:02 Kate Lister? So they had sex. How is a matter of ongoing debate? It looks like there was a kind of a docking procedure that they kind of got.
28:11 Speaker 06 I mean, as there is for basically every vertebrate.
28:13 Kate Lister? For everyone, right? Yeah. What about something like mating rituals? Because like you can't see that in bones and fossils, but presumably they must have had like a.
28:23 Speaker 06 So you can, and then this is where we can actually do much more. This is one of the things that I work on. So there's one example, but it's a multiple sites in central and southern US, which is described specifically as being a mating ritual. And I didn't write the paper, but I was one of the academic referees for it. And it's a classic case of you, you read like the headline title of, you know, evidence of a mating ritual. And I'm really quite conservative on this stuff. And I was like, there's no way you're going to convince me that you, you, you can actually demonstrate this or even have vague evidence. It's going to be something very vague and then you're going to insanely over interpret it. And I'm going to be really frustrated. And I got to the end of reading this paper.
29:05 Kate Lister? What is it? What's the dinosaur Netflix and chill?
29:08 Speaker 06 The really short version of this is what they have is it's footprints. So it's a whole bunch of track sites where what you have is two sets of pairs. So you basically have a pair of lines that are quite long and quite deep. So a pair of furrows basically side to side. And then they face another pair of furrows. So it's like you've got two equal signs on the keyboard, kind of next to each other, with a couple of spaces in between, something like that. You know, it's a time and place where we have large carnivorous dinosaurs. There are lots of large carnivorous dinosaur footprints in the area in general and on in this bed. So this is where a lot of large carnivorous dinosaurs are wandering around. And then you have these furrows, which are clearly very artificial. You know, nothing in nature is going to produce four lines that are all matched up.
29:53 Speaker 06 And then lots and lots of sets of these. So there's not just one set, there's lots of sets and in multiple different places as well. And their argument was, well, this is two animals face to face and they're bipeds. So they kind of do a scrapey dig with the left foot and then a scrapey dig with the right foot. And over time, as they do a little dance and there's probably bobbing and yelling and other things going on, they'll dig a pair of furrows. And each animal's doing that face to face and you'll end up with two pairs of furrows. And that's what you say is a nice just so story. It's perfectly reasonable. It sounds right. It makes sense. It would explain the pattern and what you see. But the really nice thing is they went, and you know what? There's a bunch of seabirds that do this. And there are, there are a bunch of birds.
30:35 Speaker 06 Off the top of my head, I cannot think of an example, but I think it may have been boobies or something like this.
30:39 Kate Lister? Of course it would be.
30:40 Speaker 06 Where one of the things they do is they line up face to face and the males and females do a little nod, a little dance. And then they scrape with the left foot and then the right foot and they dig a little furrow. So we've got literally modern dinosaurs doing the exact same thing. And several different species which are not particularly closely related. So it's not like it's, oh, well, that's the pheasant thing or that's, you know, that's what pheasants do. Or that's what starlings do, or that's what crows do. These are relatively distantly related groups. All have settled on this same ritualistic behaviour. And then it's like, well, now that's really quite a convincing case. Because again, what else is going to generate this sort of thing except that? And then you have a modern analogue.
31:23 Kate Lister? No, I can't think of anything else that would do that. A kind of stumpy, stumpy thing.
31:27 Speaker 06 Right, because, you know, for example, you know, animals that fight often have ritualistic pre-fighting behaviour. Getting into a fight with someone who you might beat, but you might not is really dangerous. And finding out if it's worth it is for both sides really important. And that's why you have, you'll see it with things like deer, where they'll walk side by side and kind of stereotype walk and look at each other. And there'll be a little bit of antler clash and a little bit before they decide. Because if one of you realises, hang on, I'm probably going to get flattened here.
31:59 Kate Lister? Yeah.
31:59 Speaker 06 Pull out now. And if you're certain you're going to win, amp it up and make sure the other guy backs down. But if this is serious, it then accelerates. So maybe it would be something like that. But those animals rarely just stand face to face. And then digging wouldn't be showing your size or your prowess or anything like that.
32:19 Kate Lister? What about the dinosaurs bodies themselves? I mean, you've convinced me. That's got my random seal of approval. That's what that sounds like to me. But what about like their bodies, like the, I'm so sorry, I don't know the names of them. The ones with like the frilly necks, where like they've got that rough thing that comes up, or the stegosaurus, like all the spikes and stuff. Is that anything to do with the mating ritual or just accessorizing?
32:40 Speaker 06 So I think you're thinking of triceratops and its kin.
32:42 Kate Lister? Thank you. Yes.
32:43 Speaker 06 And then, yes, triceratops, it's pretty, everyone's familiar with spikes on the nose and then a big frill. It's actually the back of the head. It sticks out over the neck. But we often call it a neck frill because it kind of covers the neck, which is basically largely solid bone. Actually, triceratops is weird. It's solid. The others have holes in them. But this is a group of dinosaurs called the ceratopsians. And I specifically have worked on an animal called Protoceratops from Mongolia and China. And it's, it's like sheep sized a big Protoceratops. But in particular, it has this really big frill, which all the ceratopsians, or nearly all the ceratopsians have. And this has been the subject of arguments for years, basically, exactly what was it for? And some form of sexual communication
33:24 Speaker 06 or sexual dominance and social, you know, I'm big and I'm sexy, basically signal, was always kind of the favoured idea. But then, how do you test that? And I realised that actually, there were ways of getting to that.
33:37 Kate Lister? Okay.
33:38 Speaker 06 If you looked at modern species as your analogue. And the example I always give is, I know not everyone's necessarily familiar with with this level of agriculture, but you will probably know if I, if I tell you. If you imagine if you've seen cows in a field or sheep.
33:52 Kate Lister? Yep.
33:52 Speaker 06 They can be quite big, not yet adult size, but quite big. And they have really stumpy little horns. And then a few months later, they'll be full size and suddenly whoop, their horns are massive. And this is basically a super normal pattern in biology and for very clear biological reasons. When you are young, the biggest threat to you is basically being eaten. It's really easy to be eaten and killed when you are small. And so what you need to do is grow as quickly as possible. If you want to mate and have offspring, and there's obviously a very strong evolutionary imperative to do so. So you grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow, grow until you are sexually mature, until you're big enough to compete.
34:32 Speaker 06 Or as a male or big enough as a female to lay large enough eggs or have a large enough baby that it's likely to survive. And you've got the resources to do that. At that point, now growing is far less important than having sex. So suddenly sex kicks in as a driver. And that's when, if you're a fighting animal, you grow your big horns. Or if you're a signaling animal, like a peacock with its train, you suddenly grow all your pretty bright feathers. And you can see this in dinosaurs, because with Protoceratops, we have got lots and lots of specimens. Everything from tiny hatchlings through to big adults. So you can measure how big they are and then measure how big their frill is and compare the two.
35:14 Speaker 06 And low and behold, the growth curve of the frill is it doesn't grow very much for ages. And then about the age we think they hit sexual maturity, it suddenly grows much faster.
35:24 Kate Lister? Is anybody working on dinosaur vaginas? Just out of interest, like there's a lot of work being done on penises, but what are vaginas doing?
35:32 Speaker 06 There is, well, so again, they do not have a vagina, they have a cloaca. And even the males would have a cloaca, it's just the penis would extend from that. So they just have this single urinary genital opening. There is one known, so it's an animal called-
35:44 Kate Lister? Genital opening?
35:45 Speaker 06 Yes.
35:46 Kate Lister? A urinogenital opening?
35:48 Speaker 06 A combined exit for all systems, as I say, there's a effectively a one stop-
35:54 Kate Lister? Why isn't this classed as a vagina? I mean, I get the idea that it's like a one stop shop. It's like everything in one, but why don't they call it a vagina?
36:03 Speaker 06 There's two possible answers. It could be both. So one possible answer is some anatomists and taxonomists get very het up about what you should or shouldn't call certain structures depending on their evolutionary history.
36:15 Kate Lister? With you.
36:15 Speaker 06 So the vagina is a mammalian structure that only mammals have, therefore you shouldn't call that in anything else. Now, that obviously doesn't work very well because a friend of mine pointed out, well, we call eyes, eyes, but actually the eyes, for example, that you see in clams and the eyes that you get in octopus and vertebrate eyes are completely independent evolutionary structures. They do not have a shared ancestry, but no one doesn't say octopus has eyes. They just go, it's got eyes. So that's one. But I think the second one, more importantly, in this case, is it is fundamentally different because a vagina in mammals is effectively just to have sex through and then give birth through.
36:56 Speaker 06 Whereas, as I said, both a male and female dinosaur would have a cloaca. So they're really not comparable. And it's then very odd to say it's give it one name in a female and a different name in a male when they're effectively identical structures.
37:16 Kate Lister? I'll be back with David after this short break.
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38:41 Kate Lister? In the animal world, true monogamy is actually incredibly rare. Like the idea that you see somebody, you fall in love with them, and then that's it, that's you forever and ever and ever. In fact, I think that there's, it's a handful of species it's been observed in, and even some of them have been found to be cheating. It's like, it's hardly any.
38:59 Speaker 06 Yeah, they usually do. I think there's some albatross which are extremely reliable.
39:03 Kate Lister? Yeah, like there are some birds that do it, but that made me think, what do you think, were dinosaurs monogamous?
39:11 Speaker 06 So, almost certainly not, because as you say, even supposedly monogamous things often cheat. And there's lots of cheating going on in lots of things that we have studied. I think what's really interesting is when you start getting into the sexual selection stuff that I've worked on with the frills, one of the common patterns that we see, not just in things like the Ceratopsians, but lots of other dinosaur groups too, is males and females are often very similarly ornamented. And this is quite unusual. It does turn up in various groups. Actually, seabirds is another one, penguins are the same. It's actually true of a whole bunch of parrots. And there's actually a whole bunch of fish, seahorses and pipefish and that group as well, is what we call mutual sexual selection, where rather than going down like the classic lion route, or the peacock route, or the deer route, well,
39:55 Speaker 06 elephant seals, where males are much, much bigger, or have their horns, or have their displays, or fight, or whatever it is they actually do. The males and females are very similar to each other. And that usually kicks in in species, or I think almost universally kicks in in species, where males and females are both investing in their offspring. Because the short version is, from a purely reproductive success output. If you're a female, you're putting a lot of effort into your eggs. That's a lot of energy versus like a small packet of sperm. So you are putting your energy into that next generation. You want them to have the best possible chance of surviving and doing well and spreading your genes. So you want the biggest, bestest male, whatever that is.
40:38 Speaker 06 And in general, that's the biggest one, or the fightiest one, or the one with the best colours and just display, because he's demonstrating, well, I'm fit and healthy. I wouldn't have all these feathers if I couldn't escape predators. If I didn't have time to groom them, if I couldn't find the nicest food and I was free of parasites. As it was what we'd call an honest signal. And therefore, all the females want to mate with them. And that's why you'll get deer with a harim or lions with their pride or peacocks mating absolutely everything if they're the top, top one. And from the male perspective, their effort is going into that signal or that combat or being big, and then just a little bit of sperm everywhere and hopefully they'll get quite a few kids out of that. But what happens if the male isn't doing that?
41:18 Speaker 06 You look at something like the emperor penguins, where the male sat on the ice for six months with an egg on his feet. If the male doesn't do that, that egg is never surviving. So the male is putting just as much effort in as the female. The female may have laid the egg, and that's more expensive than the sperm. But standing on the ice for six months, trying not to die in an Antarctic winter, that's an enormous energy effort from a male. So he's now in the same boat, because he doesn't want to end up with a duff female. He's got one shot at mating and he's going to put his entire reproductive effort into the year, into one egg. So now you've got a system where the female wants to advertise for the best male, but the male wants to advertise for the best female.
42:02 Speaker 06 And what happens is, they both end up with signalling structures to signal to each other.
42:07 Kate Lister? Interesting.
42:08 Speaker 06 And that's where this kicks in. So when you look at something like Triceratops, we've got dozens of specimens with Triceratops. Every single one has horns and a frill. You don't have anything like deer where stags have antlers and females don't. That doesn't rule out cheating because boy, you know, blue tits are the classic example of this. So blue tits were like the original study animal for this was like, oh, there's this lovely monogamy and the male and female work together to raise the blue tit tits. And then they find that both males and females cheat rampantly. So yeah, so that doesn't mean it's not happening, but is your base system? I think there's a lot of mutual parental care going on in a lot of dinosaurs.
42:46 Kate Lister? So as a final question then, just as a complete random question, do you think dinosaurs had orgasms?
42:51 Speaker 06 Um, I'm not aware that birds or reptiles do.
42:56 Kate Lister? Is that just a mammal thing?
42:57 Speaker 06 Is it more than a primate thing? This is where you need to speak to a mammologist or a primatologist, not me.
43:05 Kate Lister? Just because like in mammals, obviously the orgasm, well, actually there's a lot of debate about why women in primates orgasm. But the sort of the general thought is that it's, it's because it feels nice and it helps you want to, to mate. I'm just wondering what the payoff is for dinosaurs if they had sexual pleasure.
43:23 Speaker 06 I think we're getting into the realms of if, which is well beyond normal speculation, I'm afraid.
43:29 Kate Lister? Shall we just say that we hope that they did?
43:32 Speaker 06 Make them happier. Yeah.
43:35 Kate Lister? Dave, you've been so much fun to talk to. If people want to know more about you and your work, where can they find you?
43:41 Speaker 06 The obvious thing is davehonen.co.uk is my central website. So that has links to absolutely everything. I have a podcast called Terrible Lizards. You can guess what the subject of that is. I have several books out, both pop sci and more technical and a bunch of kids books. I write for the Guardian occasionally. I'm on a lot of the classic social media sites. That should lead you to everything else.
44:03 Kate Lister? Thank you so much for coming to talk to us today. You've been wonderful.
44:07 Speaker 06 Thanks for having me.
44:14 Kate Lister? Thank you for listening and thank you so much to David for joining us. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like, review and follow along, whatever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just fancied saying hi, then you can email us at [email protected] . We've got episodes on everything from Lilith, the original biblical sinner, and, speaking of sinners, Genghis Khan, all coming your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckless. The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again, Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music, Epidemic Sound.
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