SEX: Naughty female stegosauruses offered it on a PLATE Differences in stegosauruses' armour plating may have had distinctly sexual origins, the University of Bristol's Evan Thomas Saitta suggests. Sophie, the teenage Stegosaurus starlet on display at the Natural History Museum, has 19 plates along her back. These are quite thin, suggesting no particular utility in defence. …
Whenever biologists can't figure out something about an animal, they say it's for mating rituals.
And whenever archaeologists can't figure out something about a civilization, they say it's religious.
Probably because if that's the only explanation they can come up with, well then it must be the truth. Sherlock Holmes has a lot to answer for.
Quote from the article: "Differences in stegosauruses' armour plating may have had distinctly sexual origins, the University of Bristol's Evan Thomas Saitta suggests"
Note the two words "MAY", "SUGGESTS". Neither of those two words supports your contention that Saitta thinks the idea "MUST be the truth"
Dinosaurs had more or less the same sort of genital arrangement as do birds, namely a common orifice for urine, faeces and genital systems; this set-up is common to birds, reptiles and marsupials. Only eutherian mammals (the group we're in) evolved away from this arrangement.
In reptiles, this makes mating a fairly delicate operation; the male has to get it just right although having not one but a pair of penises probably assists somewhat here. In birds, a couple of different techniques are used; the majority use a penis-less sperm transfer, and ducks, geese and ratites use various penis-like structures of varying but occasionally rather improbable dimensions (two feet for Argentinian Lake ducks).
Dinosaurs presumably used penis-like structures and some seem to have slightly more robust pelvic bones that presumably acted as support. However even this arrangement still looks improbable for animals like Stegosaurus; the dorsal plates would seem to preclude the male getting very close to the female. Stegosaurs also had particularly small brains, even for herbivorous dinosaurs, so whatever they did must not have required much thinking to achieve.
The only problem is that behaviour and soft tissue structures don't fossilise. So, any suggestions as to what went on?
On a more serious note, why do we suggest that they even had intercourse - maybe the females laid their unfertilised eggs in a cosy place and the males sprayed over it? Then again, this might have involved a bit too much thinking. Unless, like today's dogs, they "marked" about everywhere...
Wouldn't that require that they be more of an egg sac than hard shelled egg?
Good point! Do we know that they had hard shelled eggs? But I guess that also depends on the kind of sperm cells - what do we know about them? I mean, these were dinosaurs' sperm cells!
Bearing in mind that dinosaurs are largely extinct, their way of reproduction may not have been the most successful...
"Bearing in mind that dinosaurs are largely extinct, their way of reproduction may not have been the most successful..."
Either that or the universe dropped a stuffing great rock on their heads ;-)
The Saurians actually represented the highest level of physical evolution yet. For example the only instance of a true ball joint that has ever existed in nature is the Ceratopsians' neck/head joint. It allowed total freedom of movement for the armoured head. They were completely caught off guard by a totally unprecedented event.
"marsupials"
Nope. The vast majority of marsupials have bits like ours. Only two species have the single-opening arrangement: platypus and echidna. These two are collectively known as "monotremes". All the others (kangaroos, wombats, possums, bilbys, etc etc etc) possess the kind of undercarriage you'd normally expect of any mammal.
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