Have We Just Discovered A Way To Tell A Female Dinosaur From A Male? These Paleontologists Think So

There’s plenty of rough sex in the animal kingdom, but dinosaur copulation may have been so violent that it literally broke the spine of the female. Ironically, though, that’s wonderful news for palaeontologists, as the love scars left behind by these prehistoric couplings may finally enable us to distinguish between male and female specimens. The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.

Until now, determining the sex of fossilized dinosaurs has proved impossible as the soft, gooey sexual organs of these ancient creatures have all long-since decomposed. At the same time, researchers have spent decades wondering why all species of herbivorous hadrosaurs – or duckbilled dinosaurs – tend to display extraordinarily high rates of h