We finally know what a dinosaur cloaca looks like.
Or, as the CNN article is headlined, This fossil reveals how dinosaurs peed, pooped and had sex
We know a lot about dinosaurs – what they looked like, what they ate and what killed them off – but no fossils have definitively preserved two dinosaurs in the act of mating.
However, a fossil from China of a Psittacosaurus is so well preserved that the opening the Labrador-size dinosaur used to pee, poop and reproduce is visible, allowing paleontologists to study it for the first time.
…
“It is very unique. Most cloacas form a kind of slit. Sometimes it’s a vertical split, sometimes it’s a smiley face, sometimes it’s a sour face. This thing has a V-shaped structure with a pair of nice flaring lips and there’s not a living groups of animals that have morphology like that,” Vinther said. “It is somewhat similar to crocodiles but still unique.”
What’s more, the outer margins of the cloaca are highly pigmented with melanin . While they don’t know for sure what color it was, it likely would have contrasted with the dinosaur’s pale underbelly, Vinther said.
Bolding mine
https://www.cnn.com/2021/01/19/world/dinosaur-fossil-sex-study-scn/index.html
Historical reference:
As Cecil explained in http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/2357/how-did-dinosaurs-have-sex , the urinary, digestive, and reproductive tracts of dinosaurs meet in a chamber called the cloaca, from which the appropriate excretions and secretions leave the body.
My question: is the actual opening also called the cloaca, or is it something else, such as cloacal opening, anus, or anal opening? I’m writing a short story which is narrated by a palentologist, and I need to make him sound like he …
Fossilized Dinosaur Cloaca!
BAND NAME!
CalMeacham:
peed, pooped and had sex
Further evidence that all those nasty librul political commentariat taking pot shots at the reptilian brain of the GOP are 180 degrees in error. They are looking at the wrong end.
So happy that this wasn’t a Mitch McConnell joke…
You would need a real stoner to hump that. A boner won’t do it.
Ruken
January 20, 2021, 5:38pm
7
The headline in my Google news feed was
1st preserved dinosaur butthole is ‘perfect’ and ‘unique,’ paleontologist says
Just like a Trump telephone call
Babale
January 20, 2021, 6:29pm
9
Through phylogenetic bracketing I think we could have already concluded that dinosaurs had cloaca (since birds and crocs do), but this is still a very unique find. The fact that we are now able to tell what color dinosaurs were by studying fossilized pigments is also mindblowing, especially when you consider how recently we even started doing that.
If the dinosaur is that well preserved, is any of the internal anatomy preserved along with it? Is the internal plumbing still there?
Ruken
January 21, 2021, 8:52pm
11
My recollection of the article I read was that no, nothing internal was preserved. So they don’t know if this one was male or female.
MPSIMS is the wrong place for political potshots. Please take it to P&E.
That goes for the rest of you, too.