You're listening to Weird and Dead, the paleontology podcast
that tells evolutions most embarrassing and bizarre
stories. I'm Amy Atwater.
And I'm Megan Wetherell, and we're two living scientists who
are weirdly excited about dead things.
Speaking of excited, did you know that some animals had bones
in their Dicks? And correspondingly in their
clitoris. Yes, this week is all about
evolution and the loss and the use of actual Bony boners, the
baculum and the Bob bellum. So of course, given that, you
should expect that in this episode we are going to talk
about genitalia and other gross things.
So please check the warnings in the description.
Also, sometimes Dick bones are used for non consensual sexual
behavior in animals, which we will briefly discuss in this
episode. So to start off with today we
are going to talk about the La Brea Tar Pits, which are an
incredible accumulation of fossils that for whatever reason
are pretty much directly in the middle of Los Angeles.
And they are incredibly large collections.
You can get a really great idea of of like morphological
variation, which as a person who has studied that in the past is
like super cool. And it means that you get
because these animals would essentially the, the herbivores
would get stuck in the sticky asphalt and then the carnivores
would come in afterwards and try to eat the dying slash dead
mammoth. And as a result, it's a
carnivore trap. So you get, in particular, very
large numbers of carnivores, including things like
direwolves, which if you were not aware, we're real, not just
a Game of Thrones thing. The amount of how much bigger
they are than modern wolves, it turns out it really depends on
which wolf subspecies you compare it to.
They were a little bit bigger than today's wolves.
They're not like huge, bigger than the biggest of today's
wolves, but they were real. And because they were so excited
about running into sticky pits of asphalt after dead and
decaying mammoths, they have preserved whole skeletons of
these animals and just tons and tons and tons of them.
So that means even little tiny nitty gritty bones, which are
the bones that we're talking about today.
Little things like they're called free floating bones.
So things like your Patella, your kneecap, sesamoid bones,
which are the bones that form a around your tendons in things
like your wrists, these are all things that preserve very poorly
in the real world. And we don't, if you don't have
them in association with the animal, you can't always tell
what they are, but very, very well in places like La Brea.
And so we're going to talk in particular about one bone, of
which there are 400 examples at the La Brea tarpit, 400
examples, 159 of them are complete, so they have no broken
bits. Of those 159, eight of them are
pathological and usually that means that they may have had
some sort of genetic deformity or they were broken and then re
healed. And it's very often a a twisting
along the long axis of the bone. So kind of like the bone got
sideswiped, knocked over and then re healed or genetically
they were born that way. And one in particular is super,
super busted and it didn't just twist over it full on folded
over to the side. And that is the first image,
Amy, that you can Scroll down and see of this bone.
And Amy is already wincing because she knows what this type
of bone is, which is called this is a baculum, which is the bone
you find in some animals penises.
That it's the subject of today's conversation.
So this poor direwolf has a broken and rehealed Dick bone.
Oh, it just, I cannot wait for us to put this picture out
there. I am like, I am like
empathically feeling the pain of people with penises around the
world who are going to look at this and just cringe with the
utter suffering that is very evident with this broken and
rehealed at a weird angle Dick bone.
So there's bacula, which are the male version, and then there's
babella, which are the female version.
So bacula, babella for multiples, baculum, babellum for
singulars. Singulars.
Who? I was doing so great on
pronouncing words that were singular or multiple, but then I
fucked up singular so. So what is a baculum?
Oh, thank you for asking, Megan. I've been waiting for that
question to be asked me my whole life.
Whole life waiting for a moment like this I was also singing in
my head like what is a good for absolutely nothing we'll talk
about that so yeah we're talking about genital bones today
they're a thing. Would you know it if you had
one? You might not actually
surprisingly I you know, we're going to say a lot of weird
things. I think we're putting the bone
and boner today is the plan. So what you already said is 1
hundo true. So baculum specifically is a the
penis bone. It's found in some placental
mammals. It's not in all mammals and it's
not like you said, it's not connected to the skeletal system
anyway, right. It's not like attached to your
spinal cord or your hips or anything like that.
They just float just little floats in the in the Dick.
Now they seem to be pretty highly selected for in some
cases, like they are pretty like prone to selection as they've
appeared and been lost and regained and lost in multiple
different lineages through time. It seems to be pretty direct
evidence for some sort of sexual selection going on.
Keeps that Dick nice and hard. Though in some animals like
bats, it seems to also aid in protecting the urethra.
So, you know, a little like, I don't know, protect it like a
mouth guard, but like a Dick guard for your pee hole.
Do they have just such violent pisses that they need more
support? I think it might be because
they're, well that's a good question.
I immediately assumed it had something to do with their
skeleton or what not being fairly lightweight and like
fragile and maybe needing some extra protection.
But that would be extra weight, so I don't.
That's where you're going to invest in one spot for extra
protection is going to be a good phone that makes sense.
Well, wow. I mean, they are pretty
essential. They're good for things, They do
things. So I was.
Feminist pain on your face as you try to tell us Dick bones
are good for things. It's another tough episode
because while it's super entertaining and funny, there
are some aspects of this that can become a little triggering,
to be totally frank. So we're gonna, we're just gonna
talk about this animal Kingdom like we always do.
And I'm gonna try to interject my fun aspect and not always my
bummer feminist rate. So one of the best things that I
learned in Graduate School was an acronym to remember all the
mammals that have genital bones. And that's PRICK, which is PRICC
stands for Primates, Rodents, Insectivores, Carnivora and
Chioptera. So bats.
And yeah, I mean, who can forget that?
So not all of those organisms within all of those groups have
genital bones, but they are seemingly constrained to those
lineages. And it does seem like because of
the timing of it, there have been some papers that have been
able to see that it's they've evolved, evolved after the split
from marsupials and monotremes, but before the most common
ancestor of primates and carnivora.
So both primates and carnivorans have genital bones.
So they think it's somewhere between 145 to about 95,000,000
years ago. The first Dick Bone did cometh.
That's what I've got on. Well, I've got a lot, but I'd
love to hear about the Bob Bellum and all the fun details
on that. Yeah.
So the Bob bellum, the word Bob bellum means jewel or gem in
Latin, which is real, real cute for a bone that is in the
clitoris of these animals. So it is the female equivalent
of the baculum and it's much smaller as we will discuss when
we get to walruses. And it is, as you might expect,
understudied, probably for a variety of reasons, but also
including the fact that it is also smaller and it is harder to
find. The clip bone is harder to find
so. She said it, not me.
She said it. So to remember which animals
have genital bones or have bibella, you can use the exact
same acronym because it's the exact same group of animals.
They are cross correlated. Of course the bibellum isn't
always present in the mammals that have bacula.
So sometimes you have bacula in a group.
So for rats, for example, male rats have bacula, female rats do
not have bibella, but there is no group that we know of that
has a bibella that does not have a bacula.
So they're linked, and you're more likely to lose the the lady
version than the male version. Interesting, interesting.
Or again we just literally like I was trying to find evidence of
fossil primates with genital bones and holy shit you think
primates are rare? Well, trying to find their
genital bones is way harder. They need to just fall into
giant pools of asphalt more often.
That's the only example. That we have of a primate that
is like the equivalent the the European equivalent of Messel.
Messel, the site we love, right. That is the only early primate
genital bone that's been found is from a male primate that was
discovered in late 1975. But I couldn't find a fucking
image of it anywhere. Rude.
Yeah. I mean, it's going to be a fun
day to go back to a lot of stuff I studied in Graduate School.
I had some triggers this week looking up old papers.
I was like, oh God. Before we dive fully into
primates, which, yeah, again, because you're probably already
going, well, you said primates. Do humans have genital bones?
We'll get there. But we do see quite a bit of,
like, diversity in sizes and shapes of these genital bones.
It's really, really interesting. They don't seem to vary
necessarily with body size, but, you know, maybe they do in the
case of, like, the walrus. So a walrus specula, more on
that later, can be about two feet long.
Some can be even longer. Some can be an almost a full
Megan, which is crazy. Yeah, some I'm one went to.
I am much bigger than two feet tall.
Just so that we're all fucking aware, Amy is not trying to say
that I am 3 feet tall. I am a regular more than that in
height. This is true.
But no, this was an exceptional
specimen. It went to auction for $8000 and
it was 4 1/2 feet long. This genital bone from a walrus,
while the smallest that we've seen are a lot of those that are
in, you know, rodents, rats and rodents have got some funky
bacula. I think the marmoset, which is a
super cute New world monkey from North, I just said the new
world. So from South America, it's got
like a 2mm long bacula in those ones.
However, you might now be wondering again.
You've said primates, Amy, so do all primates have genital bones?
No, you don't have a genital bone unless something happened
to you medically as a. Child.
Or, you know, if you went real, real freaky into body
modification. But that's something.
Different good point because essentially what the extreme
version of erectile dysfunction treatment is an implant and that
is essentially a is a genital bone that's giving you a bacula
so that you can stay hard because that's all we care about
is dude staying hard. That's literally really what
this entire fucking episode is about.
So I don't know, not my, I'm like, thank God.
I just had to like go down, bro Taverns.
Anyway, so how did we get this bacula, this genital bone?
As we said, it's a mammalian thing.
It shows up in true placental mammals.
So it's not in things like Kangaroos.
It's not in things like a platypus.
Again, it's not in all of these groups.
Now why? Why do we have a genital bone
are why do certain groups have a genital bone?
This is going to quickly get into the human aspect of why not
right? Like that's the most common
thing folks are going to wonder is why humans do not.
But for most part, folks think that they're there to impart
rigidity, which is just science speak for keeping that Dick
hard. And another big part is making
intercourse doing it last even longer.
Now, this isn't just for like, their pleasure.
It's also frequently scientifically thought of as a
way to keep a female like, occupied while she's like,
soaking up those swimmers. And so she can't immediately
run, yeah, like looking into her eyes while you're still up in
there, and so that the female can't go copulate with another
male. And then you're in more direct
sperm competition. So it's like this post coming.
Adaptation, if you will. So what's really interesting in
the scientific literature on this is what would be your guess
of what the defining threshold is for long intermission
durations versus short? So what do you think is the
magic number? What counts as yeah, long sexual
interaction in the animal Kingdom?
In the animal Kingdom, you know, I just know that birds do that
like real fast cloacal kiss. So I'm going to go with a minute
as being the cut off for long. It's pretty good.
You're you're. That does not reflect any human
thing, but. That's what I'm telling you.
That's what I'm saying is I was like researching this episode.
I was like, I have to be really careful.
People are going to think I'm married to a man with a barbed
penis. Nothing wrong with that.
Nothing.
No judgement. Just two paleontologists trying
to defend their husbands lack of Dick bones.
I've never seen a penis. Let's just go with that.
Let's just pretend. Okay, back to why you would need
a Dick bone. So in some cases, like cats,
there actually needs to be stimulation for the female to
even trigger ovulation. And so they're thinking that
like more increased time and duration and stimulation, better
chance that the female is going to have an egg ready to be
fertilized. Now there's this one, which is
called the vagina friction hypothesis, which is somehow
even worse than it sounds, which is hard to do.
And literally the paper was like, it's like a shoehorn to
get into a stubborn vagina. And I was like, Oh my God, it's.
Why would a shoehorn be helpful to?
Get this is. Always this.
Is going into that borderline not consensual aspect of this
discussion, which is very much that a Dick bone can help you
get there even if the female is not wanting you to get there.
We're going to talk more about the absurd ones having to do
with the long Oh my God, I didn't even answer the question.
Oh my God, everyone's been waiting to know how long
scientific sex is so. It's about it's not that long.
It's not as long as we've waited.
It's definitely short. It's it's 3 minutes.
It's actually 3 minutes is what they decided, at least in one
paper. So they're saying that in
species that fuck for more than 3 minutes, there tends to be
more of a presence of a Dick bone.
Now here is when I'm going to start throwing all of the curves
and like, yeah, but not this group.
Yeah, but not that group. So an immediate one that doesn't
follow this rule is the bonobos. Right?
The chimpanzee, the cousin of chimps, they've got a bacula.
All other apes except humans have a Dick bone.
But bonobos fuck for like 15 seconds, like 8 seconds.
Like it is just like done ow. And so they don't follow the
rule of longer doing it equals more Dick bones because like
they don't follow any rules because they've been gained and
lost many times through evolution.
So there's probably just like so many different factors that we
don't even have. We're so distracted by genitals
that we're just like Dicks like me.
So we do seem to think that smallest bacula seem to be
observed in species that have mating systems where females
mate with just a single male, whereas bigger or wider or
stronger here bacula are usually found in species where females
mate with multiple partners. But again, I just told you about
chimps and bonobos. They're multi male, multi female
mating. They're doing it with each
other, all the fucking. Got to make that.
Bonobos, it's literally conflict resolution yes.
And so again, like they're they're implying that a
monogamous mating system or a polygynous where it's like 1
male who's not competing for any with any other males that those
would have smaller Dick bones. But that doesn't seem to follow
the rules. But what does actually is my
first image. For you I best OK bones, so go.
Ahead and take a. Look at.
They look like. Yeah, yeah.
I mean, the upper right is literally described as a Trident
shape. Yeah.
And the other one, the upper left is rice rats and then the
bigger ones at the bottom are bears and a sea lion.
So we've got basically like a spork, a curled spork, we've got
a Trident shape with a real fat face and we've got a stick and
those are the Dick bone shapes. That we are, yeah.
And I really enjoyed that. You said babela means like,
jewel or gem because baculum just means stick.
So, you know, that's pretty telling.
It's pretty fucking telling. Yeah, you can Scroll down and
we're talking about primate apes in particular, which I love this
image so fucking much. I, I think about it probably
daily, I'm not even going to lie.
But if we're talking about the genital bones of apes, of
primates, you know, we are apes, then you have to talk about the
mating system of primates, apes, including us.
And So what this image is showing you is showing you the
relative testicle size to body size, to penis length.
Oh, and boobs. OK, so there's they're they're
using those like male and female, like the symbols, and
they have decided to not include the fact that those usually have
like a cut out Center for the circle.
So the male what is just a big ball with an arrow pointing out
the top and the female is a big ball with a cross pointing out
the bottom, which they've also chosen to represent testicle
size AS2 small balls on the bottom of the male symbol, that
breast size. Wow.
The female version in the middle, which I think they were
intending to be like with nipples, Yeah.
So testicles are just two empty balls.
Breasts are empty balls with a little dot in the middle.
But instead of looking like breasts, it looks like a little
stick figure that's shocked like.
It's so surprised. Yeah.
Wow. What a graphic.
It's amazing and I love it and I really think about it often.
What I want you to notice here is that the relative size of the
arrow for the male symbol, right?
That tells you how long the Ding a Ling is of the specific
species. Like how so?
This is literally how they're saying what your balls are
compared to your body size, compared to your shaft length.
And there are so many articles out there you can just Google it
and find they're all like, hey, dudes, you should feel good.
You've got the biggest Dick out of all the apes.
And it's like, really? Is that how much we're trying to
just like pander to the fragile ego of like, really?
And it doesn't hold up across primates as a whole either,
y'all? Like there's some baboons who've
got some lengthy danglings, but within apes we are unique and
that we have a long Dick, relatively small balls to body
size. And why that matters is both can
be used to reconstruct the ancestral human mating system.
So if you look at gorillas on the far right, we have the
gorilla who what would you say about his testicles to body
size, to Dick size based on this?
He's going more for like a statue of David.
Look like small Dick, small balls.
Yep, teeny tiny. Yeah.
I mean, gentlemen, if your Dick is longer than two 2 1/2 inches,
congratulations, you have a bigger Dick than a gorilla, who
weighs way more than a human male.
And gorillas have teeny tiny nut sacks relative to their body
size as well. And again, this has to do with
their mating system. So gorillas are what we would
call polygynous. They have one male, the
silverback gorilla, and he has his group of females and he has
total access to them. They're not sneaking away and
slipping it to other gorillas and whatnot.
Like, so he is not competing with any other male but him.
So he doesn't need to make a ton of sperm all the time.
So he's got these teeny little balls.
And then we've got bonobos on the other end who have giant
testicles and an average size Dick.
And this has been used to say, well, yeah, they have this mini
male, mini female mating system. So the males need to be
producing so much spunk because their sperm are competing more
than the individual visuals are. And so humans kind of fall in
between. And honestly then we just have
these like big Dicks, which is is interesting and we're we're
going to get into that, but we don't have a baculum.
So is our big Dick because we lost the baculum and we are able
to get hard, stay hard because of the the vascular penis that.
We've discussed. Before and essentially by
pumping that blood through the corpus cavernosum to be able to
stay hard. So that's just some food for
thought as we continue, because now we're going to talk about
why humans don't have a baculum. And this has been debated so
fucking much. Now people who read the Bible
will tell you that it is because sometimes the biblical sense of
rib that was taken from Adam might actually be his Dick bone.
We're just like, I'll say a prayer for that.
So it's biblical, end of story, end of story.
So one article I read was like, well, we don't have baculum
because we don't meet that three minute benchmark.
Human males on average the bust a nut at about two minutes.
Now there are other studies that are like no a lot of humans the
average is more around 5 minutes but again it can be way less
than that. Again, like from what I've read,
I wouldn't know. Self reported or timed?
So we know that chimps, bonobos, right?
They're very close. They last about 20 seconds.
We know the gorilla is lasting about 90 seconds.
And the only ape that seems to be doing it for longer than
human time is the so I'm looking at Pongo, which is orangutan.
So it just like that's already not following the rules around
this like longer intermission thing like that.
You need to have a long doing it time to have a Dick bone when
humans don't follow that and these other ones that do have
Dick bones are not lasting that long at all.
So I kept reading about other hypothesis.
I'm just going to go through them.
Some of them are fucking batshit crazy.
So like this next one and it's because it's from Richard
Dawkings. He just published it in a book.
And so it tells you it's not peer reviewed.
But I guess if your name is Dick and you're a Dick, then you get
to be an expert on Dicks. His take was that we lost the
Dick bone because females needed to see if a male could get hard
or not because erection failure is a sensitive early warning of
health and that it's like if you didn't have a Dick bone, you
could like still be unhealthy. Or if you did have a Dick bone,
you could still be unhealthy and get a heart.
And so that like females were like, and obviously there's shit
tons of problems with this besides the fact that it wasn't
peer reviewed and tested, but it largely that like usually Ed
seems to vary more with age than with a particular ailment.
So it's just like would really just, you know, keep.
But then again, like early humans aren't living past like
30. So maybe there would be
something to that. That's what Richard Docking is
saying. I didn't say that, Richard
Docking said. See we Richard Docking talking
is something else. OK, so some other classic ones
is essentially that a boneless penis would be more flexible and
facilitate more range of motion and body movement for the
females to get greater stimulation.
But as we've learned from the size of the baculum and other
apes, they're really tiny and would be in like the distal part
of the tip and it would be like literally, they say 15mm long.
So it probably wouldn't have limited any of that.
So most folks don't seem to like that one.
Other folks have thought that the evolution of bipedalism and
sperm competition resulted in the need for a longer penis that
like maybe they would need a bigger supporting baculum and
which then ties into so if that's favoring selection
against a baculum but for a large penis, so is that because
the large baculum was a discomfort to males and
vulnerable to injuries, which is what this most recent paper?
That makes sense. Was like, yeah, it's because a
human male has this longer Dick, right We've already established
that they've also stood up so you can see it it is like right
there. So if it had a baculum and
they're also his paper goes into gaining awareness of like you
realize that oh, they have a baculum.
If I not tap that male, I could break his baculum and out
compete him. And so essentially it is like
this idea that to avoid male male Dick breaking, we lost, we
lost the baculum. Yeah.
Well, maybe we should go back into dire wolves now and talk
about. Oh yes.
So out of 400 bacula that are in La Brea, only one of them was
super, super obviously busted. So pathologically was definitely
busted. Only eight were pathological,
but that doesn't mean that all of them were broken.
But this one that was broken is broken to the side.
And this might be a good point to bring up the fact that
direwolf bacula are way they have more volume than a wolf
bacula does. So these animals are not that
different in size and their length isn't that much different
far as the bacula. But the the girth of the bacula
is far, far bigger in dire wolves.
And basically they just have a very robust.
And so the idea is that it's to avoid scenarios very much like
this one, where the thought is that perhaps the male wasn't
just like nut tapped by another dire wolf, but was in the
process of mating with a female and then sideswiped by a
competitive. Rude.
And the fact that this bacula is broken doesn't actually mean
that that was a bad characteristic, because of
course, you know, 8 pathological bacula out of 400 is a pretty
low percentage overall of broken Dick bones, right?
Yeah. So I can only imagine that if
the direwolf's were capable of like complicated reasoning and
we're like, if I slam him off right now that boys gonna break
his Dick bone that probably they they may have gone more of a
less less Dick bone kind of way. But right there are correlations
within most canines with kind of that robusticity and the volume
and the size also being related to of course, group size.
So big old Dicks that are usually pretty simple and not
very complex in shape in canids are related to bigger bigger
pack sizes. Interesting.
OK. Whereas with monogamous canines
or canids that have a smaller like pack size and less
competition, in theory they still have bacula for the most
part, but they have bacula that are more complex in shape.
So instead of just going for thick and strong.
Ornamental. Yeah, they have more, you know,
intriguingly complex shaped bacula, which is.
I have pictures to show you later, yeah.
Yeah. So bacula that are really thick
seem to be maybe correlated with group size, which is interesting
because it does tell us that, you know, I mean, even if we
didn't have hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of dire
wolves kind of fossilized together, that might potentially
be a good indication that they had packs of some kind.
You can look at the Dick bone to see the pack size.
OK, no, that's really interesting because of not only
do primatologists look at the Dick bone and its intricate
nature, they also just straight up look at the Dicks and have
also claimed that you can kind of infer mating system again
from Dick decor if you will, and that again trying.
To. Interpret humans.
Just Dick core. Dick Core, name of the episode.
OK, so right, this like, I love this talk about behavior from
bones, right? I mean, like that's what we're
talking about really. And that's what we're trying to
understand about humans or the lack of this bone, because
people really fucking care about the ancestral mating condition
of human beings, because there's a lot of judgement and bias and
religious overlays that are really.
Absorbed as a species. We are Well, come on, a
Narcissus is us. So I mean, yeah, no, we had no
hope. We care a lot about our our
genitals in in general. So some folks really want to
argue that human beings are naturally monogamous.
They really like this idea that there wasn't as much competition
so your balls aren't as long. But then when we look at the
sexual dimorsivism between males and females, that would indicate
that they're probably isn't monogamy going on.
And the fact of the matter of like modern day human societies
do a whole bunch of different things from monogamy to serial
monogamy for polygyny, which is considered 1 male multi females
or polyandry, which is one female multi males like human
beings do it all. It's hard again to be like we're
observing humans in the wild and other college student is is
fucking the one you know, it's like it's just really, really be
hard to do. That was.
That was by David Attenborough at the dorms.
I was. Going to say that was a
disturbing David Attenborough. So one of the things that comes
up is that the human penis is in fact extremely dull.
It does not have lumps, ridges, flanges, kinks, or any other
exciting type of feature that other primates have.
In primates, this lack of penis complexity is usually found in
monogamous species. So now let's go look at some
monkey Dicks and to your first example of penile morphology in
primate species that have a non gregarious AKA dispersed mating
system. So we have things like a a
galago. We have things like some other
we've got nictecebus, cocaine. That's a slow loris.
You know what these look like. Tell me.
They look like anal chimneys. I it's.
Really complex. Some of them look kind of scaly.
It's like Willy Wonka went X-rated.
I don't know. It's especially G with like just
the little ball at the end, like hi, hi.
Yeah, these are all I don't. Know I like I like F with the
butterfly wings it's very. It looks like an armadillo
somehow. I don't know how, but it does.
So these are what they're referring to is like more ornate
penises. And these are a dispersed
species. So like primates that live
pretty solitary and just come together to mate.
So take what you will from that H, the lower left is the only
ape included. So this is the orang and this is
Congo, you know. So this is dispersed.
This is the bells and whistles you get on your disperse stick.
They can scroll on down to the next set of observations on the
genitalia of primates. So these are what we would call
multi male, multi female mating system.
So again, they even use my least favorite word, promiscuous.
And again, I guess like their point is that they're supposed
to be more like less boring. And I guess some of these might
be a little less boring, but some just look pretty fucking
boring to me. They just look like weird animal
Dicks. OK.
And then our final image is those of primate species that
are within a monogamous pair forming or again that polygynous
so that like 1 male, multi female.
So these are the ones that aren't competing that are in,
you know, like they're like H there again is, I'm pretty sure
are gorilla. So you can see it's not very
big. And now what's also interesting
about this is they have quite defined heads of the Dicks here
too, which other authors have pointed out that that in itself
seems to be an adaptation for sperm removal from a female.
So I'm just kind of confused if these are truly, you know,
monogamous and again, like, how do we even testing this with I'm
sure in this time we've actually with genetics realized that some
of these are not even monogamous in in true practice.
So really, I mean, it's just I think it's really like whatever
you want to make of it with why humans don't.
I think there's a variety of factors playing in with the fact
that we became bipedal. So I read this really funny.
Oh my God, where is it? I was laughing so hard.
It is from a publication from the Mankind Quarterly and it is
all about how when we became bipedal, right we we stood up on
two legs that it changed the reproductive passage of females
and it became longer essentially.
And it says this may have posed a potential problem for the
small penis rear mounting males. I just I just I just don't have
the maturity to handle that. So essentially saying that Dicks
had to get long to do it doggy style because front facing was
like too complicated or something like that.
And so that selection must have favored a longer Dick so that
they could like accommodate the change of space and new
biological constraints of being bipedal.
And oh God, there was like an another point to oh, something
about how like when as males stand up, they no longer have as
much protection to hide and like, and and as many cats maybe
even in the body to like tuck their junk because it was all
used because we again stood up. And so that may have selected
for against the bacula so shrinkage could happen and that
you could just shrink it all up. But again, if we're talking
about a bacula that's only 15mm long, I think you could still
shrink 15mm long. So the the jury is fucking out.
There isn't a consensus. And there is a research project
that we wrote about for the blog ages ago, and I'm going to end
on this note. Is this idea that sperm
competition in males, they literally wrote this paper.
It is this horrifying paper all about the human penis as a semen
displacement device. And they literally just took a
bunch of sex toys, including a false vagina, and had the male
authors decide the consistency of like a cornstarch and water
semen. And then they, like, tried to
measure how much semen was displaced from the sex toy.
And they made a point that when they interviewed college
students that the men would say that after they'd been away from
their girlfriends for a longer amount of time or suspected that
she had been and unfaithful, they would drill her extra hard
and long at like, evolutionarily to remove that spunk.
So that's what a fucking scientific paper literally
interviewed college kids. I'm just horrified and
impressed. So please tell me about
something besides Dicks, because I've been looking at weird Dicks
all day. Yeah, I mean, a lot of those,
like evolutionary psychology papers are just absolutely
batshit. And I wonder if humans still had
a bacula, if maybe we would be a little bit more mentally stable
in the field of evolutionary psychology because at least that
we'd have a fossil record of Dick bones.
But would you like to know, how do you turn a baculum off and
on? Not sexually.
Like I don't already. Again, somehow applying your.
Partner, I don't I don't I this is so weird this.
Is a weird OK, OK. Please tell me OK please.
So like, evolutionary psychology is a pretty, pretty weird field,
but I've got to say that what they were doing in the 70s to
animals, way fucking weirder. Just off the rails bullshit.
So of course we're going to talk about the Bob bellum again
because it's it's great. And there is a paper that I read
where they wanted to see if they could make female mice and rats
have a longer Bob Bella that was more like basically a bacula.
And then there's some other papers that wanted to see if
they could do the opposite and reduce a male baculum to the
size of a Bob bellum. And in this particular paper,
they took rats because rats don't have bibellum.
They have a bacula, but they don't have a bibellum.
A baculum don't have a bibellum. My singular versus multiple is
getting confused again. But mice, mice have both a
baculum and a bibellum. So they took the two and they
gave them. What do you think that you could
give an animal to make its Dick bone grow bigger or its clip
bone? Give it some testosterone.
Correct. Yep.
So androgens are what they were giving these mice and rats, and
they found that if you give them androgens, both of them will get
a longer bobellum. Even though female rats don't
have a bobellum, you can make it reappear through early and
judicious application of androgens.
And it looks like depending on the time when you administer
those androgens, that will obviously both affect the length
because it affects how big it can get.
But it turns out that the baculum in mice and rats is 2
pieces. It's a Bony piece that's
proximal to the body, so close to the body, and then it's a
cartilage piece that turns into bone, so it ossifies.
That's like the end. And then the two pieces fuse, so
they have a two-part baculum. And if you give a female rat
androgens later on in life, she will develop the distal part.
She'll get the cartilage part that turns to bone, but she
won't develop the proximal part. So they kind of also appear at
different phases of life. And of course, if you castrate a
male rat, it gets more of a Bob bellum and less of a baculum.
So all of these things often have to do with testosterone,
which is why while you were looking up weird Dicks, I spent
a lot of time looking at dog vaginas.
So let's talk about dog vaginas. So there's quite a few.
Yeah. What a wonderful thing to cheer.
So there's a lot of cases, veterinary cases, dealing with
basically the development of a botbellum in female dogs.
So female dogs typically do not naturally have a botbellum.
It's usually not present, but it is present in some.
And in some, it can get so big that it can stick outside of
like the the vulva lips, which, yeah.
So it gets pretty prominent. But they they did describe,
like, the reason that it gets removed is, you know, I imagine
that that's probably going to dry it out.
But they did describe it as chronic irritation and lots of
licking. I was like, well, Are you sure
that they're irritated or they just have a hypertrophic
clitoris, Right. They're enjoying it.
Can't ask the dog. Yeah, this can be caused like.
So we haven't talked really on this podcast yet about the fact
that intersex people exist, but in dogs, there's a quite a few
examples of a bobellum forming basically in cases where you
have like an intersex dog and it can also form if you give the
dog androgens. Which leads me to a weird side.
Segway, did you know that greyhounds be juicing?
That greyhounds are getting testosterone?
Shots I'm I'm like not surprised considering we've been doing
weird things to dogs since the dawn of time.
So yeah, yeah, if I was going to guess, I'm sure like the dog
fighting ring is giving their dogs testosterone too.
Yeah, there's, there's lots of greyhounds that I guess get
androgen that helps them build muscle mass and it removes or
stops their estrous cycle, which is like it's not monthly
bleeding, but it's their, it's their biological cycle which
makes them run faster. But sometimes it also gives them
clitoral hypertrophy, where they have an extremely large that can
cause pain and problems and then has to be surgically removed.
And sometimes they just remove the whole clitoris, which I
thought was kind of weird. And then I remembered that
they're also spaying that dog. So like, I guess I don't really
know too much about the sex lives of dogs, but so yeah, Dog,
dog vaginas, yeah. OK, question all of my stuff,
right? Because we're obsessed with
humans and we're really obsessed with human Dicks.
It's all like function. What is it for?
What was it for? What do we know?
So like what with Bob Bell, I'm like, what is this driving, you
know, with all this? It's like physical from getting
the D in the V So why? Why the equivalent?
Is it just because it's not really sex linked and both are
going to develop that just because or are there actual like
functional adaptive parts to this?
So. I'm sure this will shock you but
that is understudied and as far as we know it is non functional
in most animals, possibly all animals.
So it doesn't seem to have a real purpose.
And there's some studies that have shown that the bobellum is
more variable than the baculum. So like you could have weird
different changing bobellum sizes in an animal that has a
pretty stable baculum size. And they, they suggest that this
might be related to a relaxing of evolutionary pressure on the
size of the Bob ellum. That as long as it's not big
enough to make your clitoris stick out of your vulva and get,
you know, dry, that it doesn't really matter what the size or
the shape of it is. That doesn't mean that there is
no reason for Bob Ellum. We don't have like papers that
have described a potential reason at this point.
But of course, like many pieces of female anatomy, that may just
be the result of being understudied.
But they do seem to be something you can get rid of without
androgens and increase or develop with androgens.
So there, there are definitely hormonal links.
So it's possible that a lot of these animals that do have
bacula, they probably also have a babella at some stage in their
development. It just might not actually
ossify or it might not stick around, or it might be so small
that you can't find it because some of these animals are
really, really small. And I was going to save this for
the last point, but I think I'm going to just say it right now.
As I was going through and reading, looking for papers
desperately, the Bob Ellum, I just kept coming up with
chipmunk papers. Like I don't looking for a
fossil baculum fossil Bob Ellum. Why do I keep seeing chipmunks?
So chipmunks the number one way to identify them two species.
The most reliable way to identify a chipmunk to species
is the baculum or the Bob ellum. Wow.
The genital bones. There we go.
Yeah, that's cool. I I love that.
I forgot to mention in my little intro because I get so
distracted by primates that in other groups like mostelids and
other carnivorans, so things like Badgers and raccoons that
you can actually get a relative age on an individual based on
their baculum and because of yeah, like if the tip has
ossified or not. So maybe they also have like
this two-part, that kind of system.
So yeah, they have other uses besides us being obsessed with
ourselves ourselves. Yeah, and chipmunks, I guess
they just kind of all evolutionarily converge on the
same like coat color, same size, but not the same Dick bones.
So or clip bones, different genital bones like.
We are unique, you just don't know where.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Chipmunks.
Chipmunks credit where credit. Well, on the other end of that
spectrum, in terms of size, we already have mentioned the the
walrus Usyk is also known as the usyk, which is a term from
indigenous peoples of Alaska. And it refers to not only the
walrus, but pretty much like a lot of pinnipeds.
So things like seals, sea lions, and even polar bears, they'll
refer to it. They know it to be this genital
bone. And again, it can be like around
2 feet long. Again, there's some really big
exceptions to that. So historically, they were not
necessarily really sought after for carving, but in the 20th
century, as white people were like, hey, we want your
indigenous art. They were like, we'll carve this
Dick bone for you. I found this one article that
was like, they were like, we don't, well, we don't really
care about this weird bone, but if you want to pay us for it,
yeah. Like, you know, and I'm like, I
would take that weird bone. So some fun Usyk, you know, So
this is kind of this paleo heritage that we're getting at
here, too, where it's like how fossils and how modern life
impact our culture as people as well.
So there's a famous congressman from Alaska, Don Young.
He was in office for like 65 years do something a
controversial human. And at one point I guess he it
like was reported by the Washington Post that he was
arguing with the Fish and Wildlife Service director and he
brandished an 18 inch long walrus penis bone and pounded it
into his first for emphasis. So making appearance in politics
and how I learned about the Usyk was when I lived in Alaska and I
went to Midnight Sun Brewing Company which sells and brews a
beer called the Usyk Amber and they literally have a tap handle
that is an Usyk. So they are grabbing that walrus
Dick bone every time they pour you a beer and they sell shirts
and you can buy. I saw on their website you can
buy one of those tap handles of an Usyk and I messaged them and
I said is this real bone and they have not responded let me
know. Yeah, if I'm going to get a beer
tap, that's a baculum, I want it to be real bone.
No bone clones for the I. Think considering it's $70.00
it's probably a replica. Well, would you like to hear
about walrus Bob Bella? Fuck.
Yeah. All right.
Yeah. So the walrus can get up to,
what did you say, 4 1/2 feet long for the baculum?
The longest. Yeah.
So how big do you think that the Bob Bellum is in a walrus?
I'm gonna go with like a foot long.
I'm gonna go with a foot long clip.
It's 3 centimeters. Yeah.
So really, really reduced. So go ahead and Scroll down to
the next image on that sheet. But what's interesting is that
this this size discrepancy is present in a lot of animals.
So a lot of animals have a much smaller bobellum than they do a
baculum, but not all animals. So the squirrel bobellum and
baculum are actually very similar in size and shape.
So that to me suggests there really should be more research
into the Bob ellum because if you have very similar things
between male and female, I'm curious as to the function of
the Bob ellum. But in walruses I don't think it
has much of A function. I think it's pretty much
vestigial in a sense. Vestigial.
Yeah, we we got there. Oh yeah, no, these all look so
weird. Just such such weird looking
looking pounds and, and yeah, like, especially if we're seeing
similar sizes, similar morphologies, similar like that
one's got like the squirrel's got, you know, like
ornamentation and shit. You would think that there's
some pressure there, some sort of a selective pressure.
Well, fact, I'm dicked out and I mean that in terms of this
podcast. I'm also like, there's like no
way to talk about it without sounding really weird.
I can't even say I'm finished. Thank you for listening.
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And correspondingly in their clitorises.
Clitoris I clitoris. Maybe just say Klitz.
No.