Dinosaurs Probably Weren’t Doing It Doggystyle
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Just to be clear right away, since archaeologists still haven’t discovered any old VHS tapes of dinosaurs getting it on — under the guise of having “something wrong with the refrigerator” no doubt — dinosaur sex is still something of a mystery. And not exactly a mystery that one needs a magnifying glass for, since dinosaur dongs were probably gigantic.
“Soft tissues are seldom preserved during fossilization, so we have never found a fossilized phallus, but doing so would solve many mysteries,” says well-established freelance science writer Brian Switek, whose new book My Beloved Brontosaurus: On the Road with Old Bones, New Science, and Our Favorite Dinosaurs will be out in May. He proposes a Dino-Kama Sutra as the explanation for how dinosaurs had sex, though not a very complicated one. The spikes and plating on many dinosaur tails would have made the usual sexual positions associated with animals a hassle, at the very least. In fact, Berlin’s Museum of Natural History made a computerized dramatization of dinosaurs getting it on that way, and they concluded that it would only end in castration for the screeching and pissed-off male. Castration is the worst conclusion ever.
Since the bone-fused tails couldn’t just be tossed aside during foreplay, how was it done? “Perhaps the female lay down on her side and the male reared up to rest his torso over her,” the Museum’s Heinrich Malllison posits. “Other species would have used different positions, like backing up to each other.” Now I need to see a YouTube mash-up video for the climax of Requiem for a Dream with dinosaurs.
Of course, picturing dinosaurs laying down to get some — even without the passionate eye-lock while brushing the female’s hair behind her ear — is a ridiculous notion to some, such as Professor John Long of South Australia’s Flinders University. “A 33ft-long ankylosaurus, with spikes and armor, would have had a 6ft 6in penis to bridge the gap when close to a female,’ he says. And just think of the gap it would leave behind.
