In the study of dinosaurs many scientists have debated how to distinguish between male and female dinosaurs. How do they determine it?
Nationalgeographic.co.id—Many scientists have debated how to tell the difference between male and female dinosaurs. But despite the previous claims of success, can we spot the difference?
Research led by Queen Mary University of London has shown that despite the claims of some studies, it is actually very difficult to find a difference between the sexes of the two dinosaurs.
In the study, researchers analyzed the skull of a modern gharial, or reptile, an endangered species of giant crocodile, to see how easy it was to tell males from females using only the fossil record.
Male gharials are larger than females and have a fleshy growth at the end of the snout, known as a ghara.
While the ghara is made of soft tissue, it is supported by a bony opening near the nostrils, known as the narial fossa, which can be identified on their skull.
The research team, including Jordan Mallon of the Canadian Museum of Nature, Patrick Hennessey of Georgia Southern University and Lawrence Witmer of Ohio University.
They studied 106 gharial specimens in museums around the world. They found that despite the presence of a narial fossa in males, it is still very difficult to differentiate between sexes.
In dinosaurs, it is very difficult to find differences between the sexes.
David Hone, Senior Lecturer in Zoology at Queen Mary University of London and author of the study, said that like dinosaurs, gharials were large, slow-growing reptiles that laid eggs, which made them good models for studying extinct dinosaur species.
Our research shows that even with prior knowledge of the sex of specimens, it is still difficult to differentiate between male and female gharials.
The study has been described in the journal PeerJ by title “Ontogeny of a sexually selected structure in an extant archosaur Gavialis gangeticus (Pseudosuchia: Crocodylia) with implications for sexual dimorphism in dinosaurs.”
From these results, it is understood that although there is strong evidence for sexual selection in various display features and other exaggerated structures in large extinct reptiles, such as dinosaurs, detecting sexual dimorphism in them remains difficult.
