(1)
Daily Mail, HuffPo Dumb Down Dinosex
By Brian Switek
Wired Science
July 12, 2012
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/daily-mail-dumbs-down-dinosex/

I promised myself that I wouldn't write about
prehistoric sex for a while. Between copulating turtles,
romantically entwined sharks, a review I'm writing of
John Long's Dawn of the Deed, and, not least of all, the
chapter on dinosaur sex in my next book, I've said
plenty about fossil fucking. But the Daily Mail is
making me break my vow.

Earlier today, the tabloid published a brief article on
dinosaur sex that amounted to "Hur hur, dinopeen." (It's
a close retread of a similarly titled article the Daily
Mail published last February.) And the missive is
clearly cobbled together from various quotes found
around the web, from the ruminations of the late
dinosaur sexpert Beverly Halstead to comments from
paleontologist Gregory Erickson published at the
Huffington Post yesterday. In fact, I have to admit that
I'm puzzled by the spurt of attention dinosaur mating
rituals have received over the past 24 hours. It's not
as if there's a bedrock-shaking new study to talk about,
or any kind of pertinent hook. I guess, on a slow news
day, dinosex sells.

Unsurprisingly, the Tyrannosaurus sex tale has rapidly
proliferated across the internet. While I'm generally
happy to see dinosaurs bask in the media spotlight,
though, the Daily Mail and HuffPo stories piss me off.
The stories are simply excuses to show off computer-
generated dinoporn and, in the process, they trivialize
the actual, amazing science behind our growing
understanding of how dinosaurs reproduced. I wrote an
article on this very subject for Smithsonian, and
followed that up with a four part series (1,2,3,4)
earlier this year, but let me hit a few of the
highlights.

Thanks to globs of specialized bone inside well-
preserved dinosaur fossils, paleontologists can now
identify pregnant dinosaurs. No one has found a way to
reliably sex all dinosaurs, but, thanks to this peculiar
type of tissue (called medullary bone), we can pick out
gravid females from among the lot. And that's not all.
By combining this tissue type with studies of how old
dinosaurs were when they died, paleontologists Andrew
Lee and Sarah Werning figured out that dinosaurs started
mating early, long before they reached skeletal
maturity. In other words, many dinosaurs were
undoubtedly teen moms. This has important implications
for how the biggest dinosaurs mated. Even though giants
like Apatosaurus could stretch to 80 feet, and even
bigger titans such as Argentinosaurus grew to be over
100 feet long, these dinosaurs started having sex at
smaller sizes. It's entirely possible that the
reproductive lives of sauropods were limited to a few
years after they became sexually mature, before they got
so big that sex because difficult or dangerous. There's
no need to speculate that Brachiosaurus and kin relied
on Jurassic hot tubs of just the right depth to fool
around in.

Even better, the fact that we can now reconstruct
dinosaur feather colors means that - with adequate
sample sizes - paleontologists can examine whether or
not fluffy dinosaurs put on breeding colors, or if there
were color differences between males and females. Even
if the results come back negative, that will help us
better understand dinosaur social lives and behavior.
There's a lot more to the science of dinosaur sex than
what position they preferred.

In fact, I think many paleontologists have been lax in
their circumlocutions about dinosaur mating. Everyone is
agreed that male dinosaurs mounted females, most likely
from behind, so that the pair could bring their cloacal
openings into contact. There are enough illustrations of
the archosaurs going at it dinostyle to fill a book. But
look closely at these images, as well as those posted
with the Daily Mail and HuffPo stories. The tails of the
male dinosaurs aren't in the right position to
inseminate the females. Their cloacal openings, which
exited between a backward-pointing bone of the hip and
the base of the tail, aren't very close to the genital
opening of the female. The dinosaurs are frustratedly,
ineffectually humping.

Figuring out the mechanics of dinosaur sex isn't so
simple as it sounds. We need to take a more rigorous and
detailed approach to figure out whether male
Triceratops, and its disparate relatives, really did
throw their legs over the backs of their female
partners. Even then, the same positions wouldn't have
worked for all dinosaurs. Just think of Stegosaurus,
with that long row of alternating plates. This dinosaur,
and its similarly armored relatives, must have had
different tactics to avoid injuring each other in the
process of making the next dinosaur generation.

Contrary to the Daily Mail and HuffPo articles, we
really don't have a refined idea of dinosaur sex
positions. In fact, the most startling discoveries about
dinosaur sex involve other aspects of their biology and
behavior. We are gaining a more intimate look at
dinosaurs than ever before, so skip the paleo porn and
check out the real science.

(2) 
Giant Prehistoric Sperm. `Nuff Said. 
By Brian Switek
Wired Science 
July 27, 2012
http://www.wired.com/wiredscience/2012/07/more-sexy-fossil-secrets-prehistoric-sperm/

Earlier this month, inspired by Daily Mail and HuffPo
nonsense, I went on a tear about dinosaur sex. Because
if you're going to rant, why not go big? The post kicked
up a good deal of attention, and I was honored to be
bestowed with the highly-vaunted title of "the closest
thing the Internet has to an expert on dinosaur sex" by
Cracked's Daniel O'Brien.

After that minor internet kerfuffle, I thought I had
said my peace on paleo-copulation. Best to let sleeping
dinosaurs lie, especially if they've just had sex. But
after I got back from fieldwork at Dinosaur National
Monument and starting riffling through journals for new
subjects to write about, I saw a paper I couldn't
resist. The subject, as the title makes clear in its
understated way, is "exceptionally well-preserved giant
spermatozoa" discovered in prehistoric ostracods. Giant
fossilized sperm? Yes, please!

"Ostracod" isn't a household name. That's too bad,
because there are tens of thousands of species of these
tiny, shrimp-like crustaceans. Typically, their
segmented bodies are surrounded by a hinged, tough outer
shell, and they occupy a variety of niches in both fresh
and saltwater habitats the world over. In this case, the
ostracod in question is Cypria ophtalmica - a freshwater
species that's still with us today.

The Cypria ophtalmica fossils aren't very old. In fact,
they barely make the cutoff for what counts as
prehistoric. Discovered in the Southern Carpathian
Mountains of Romania, the invertebrate fossils are only
about 14,400 to 10,000 years old. But what makes them
remarkable is the fact that Babes-Bolyai University
paleontologist Sandra Iepure and colleagues found
prehistoric sperm with both male and female ostracods,
the "richest" evidence of fossil sperm yet found.

This isn't the first time paleontologists have found
evidence of ancient sperm. Previous studies have found
sperm among roughly 5,000 year old ostracods from the
UK, spermatophores were preserved in 40 million year old
amber with an insect called a springtail, and
paleontologists identified the essential seminal and
receptacle organs among 100 million year old ostracods
discovered in Brazil. I never thought that something as
ephemeral as prehistoric sperm could survive for
thousands or even millions of years, but, once again,
the fossil record has shown me up. The new fossil sperm
collection analyzed by Iepure and collaborators adds to
the catalog of surprising fossils.

What makes the fossilized sperm so easy to spot is their
size. After some fly species, ostracods have the second
longest sperm in relation to their body size. As Iepure
and co-authors note, some 1 millimeter long ostracods
can produce sperm up to a 1 centimeter long, stretching
ten times the body length of the ostracod itself. (I
only pray that David Cronenberg never learns this fact.)
Sadly, Iepure and co-authors don't provide length
estimates for the specimens they describe, but they note
that the prehistoric specimens are consistent with what
researchers have observed among living ostracods.

Between five and ten percent of the ostracods in the
study sample contained sperm, but the individuals within
this subset don't all preserve the gametes in the same
way. In most of the specimens, the sperm bundles appear
to be neatly arranged  in the position expected for the
male reproductive organs. In the other specimens, the
sperm bunches are located in a different place and are
dislocated from each other. Based on observations of
living ostracods, Iepure and colleagues propose that
individuals with neat arrangements are males and the
ones with the messier bundles are inseminated females.
This is the first time prehistoric sperm has been found
preserved in both sexes.

So we can add a few more amorous ostracods to the
growing list of creatures that died just about the time
they mated. And, of course, this raises the question of
just how far the fossil record of sperm goes. The
ostracods in the new study were fortuitously preserved
in an environment that kept some of their delicate
features intact, and the much older springtail fossil
was trapped in amber. The further we go back in time,
the less likely it seems that even giant sperm could
have been preserved by the typical modes of burial and
fossilization, but amber does offer a possible mode of
preservation. Perhaps, as they continue to scour amber
samples, paleontologists will discover even older
prehistoric sperm. Don't hold your breath for dinosaur
semen, though. It would take a hell of a coincidence for
dinosaur sperm to somehow wind up locked in amber,
survive for over 66 million years, be discovered, and
correctly identified by a researcher. For now, we're
left to marvel at the exceptional gametes of the little
ostracods.

Reference:

Iepure S, Namiotko T, Valdecasas AG, & Magyari EK
(2012). Exceptionally well-preserved giant spermatozoa
in male and female specimens of an ostracod Cypria
ophtalmica (Crustacea: Ostracoda) from Late Glacial
lacustrine sediments of Southern Carpathians, Romania.
Die Naturwissenschaften, 99 (7), 587-90 PMID: 22751904

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