Dinosaurs must have had sex. … One of the earliest considerations of passionate dinosaur enco
Dinosaurs must have had sex. … One of the earliest considerations of passionate dinosaur encounters was put forward a century ago. In 1906, the American Museum of Natural History paleontologist Henry Fairfield Osborn used affectionate occasions between fearsome Tyrannosaurus rex to explain the dinosaur’s oft-ridiculed arms. A pair of Tyrannosaurus specimens collected by fossil hunter Barnum Brown unmistakably showed that this dinosaur had short, but heavily muscled, forelimbs. Osborn couldn’t imagine that such small arms played any role in grappling with big game like Edmontonsaurus or Triceratops, but perhaps the arm of Tyrannosaurus was “a grasping organ in copulation.” Just imagine two immense predators, one atop the other and holding onto his mate with those beefy, miniaturized appendages. Sadly, Osborn didn’t commission a drawing of the behavior from the skilled illustrators he often tapped to restore prehistoric creatures.Osborn didn’t give any serious consideration to dinosaur sex, though. Nor did many other paleontologists of his generation. Dinosaur copulation was seen as a silly subject and beyond the reach of investigation. Plus, it seemed to make dignified researchers feel rather squicky. Sex, in natural history, is a perfectly acceptable subject when considering flashy courting behavior or when boiled down into quantitative surveys of gene pools, but the sordid details of sex itself have often made researchers feel awkward. Not long after Osborn briefly mused about Tyrannosaurus sex, George Murray Levick–a naturalist with the 1910-13 Scott Antarctic Expedition–was shocked and disgusted by the “sexual depravity” of Adelie penguins (which, you’ll recall, we now know are living dinosaurs). He was especially horrified by a young male penguin that tried to mate with a dead female. Levick wrote notes in Greek so that only classically educated scientists like himself would be able to read what he observed, and when he prepared a monograph on the penguins, the passages on sexual behavior were considered so sensational and disgusting that the section was cut and only circulated among a small cadre of scientists. (It wasn’t until 2012 that Levick’s observations–which were unique for their time–were rediscovered and made publicly available.) Sexual behavior, even among living species, was a taboo subject, and speculating in unseemly detail about the mating habits of dinosaurs would surely highlight a scientist as a pervert. Whatever dinosaurs did on hot Jurassic nights was kept behind the shroud of prehistory, and it seems that this was just as well for early-twentieth-century paleontologists.–Brian Switek, My Beloved Brontosaurus (2013) -- source link