Scientists finally know how dinosaurs had sex

Scientists have discovered how dinosaurs peed, pooed, and had sex for the first time, thanks to 130 million-year-old Chinese fossil.

A study published in Current Biology detailed their findings on the discovery first made in Liaoning, China, over 20 years ago.

The paper is entitled, ‘A cloacal opening in a non-avian dinosaur.’ It focuses on the cloaca or posterior orifice of the Psittacosaurus dinosaur, which lived during the Cretaceous period that began around 145 million years ago and ended around 65 million years ago.

Lead author, Dr. Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist from the University of Bristol, told Insider: “I discovered the cloaca was preserved, that we could reconstruct it and that this would be interesting in 2016.

“We realized that nobody has ever described a dinosaur cloaca before, and very few people have looked at what a cloaca and cloacal opening looks like from the outside among living animals.

“The cloaca is used for everything: peeing, pooping, laying eggs, copulation. It’s basically the Swiss army knife of orifices, it can do everything but eating and breathing,” Dr. Vinther continued.

Discovery is a ‘game changer’

Because of this pigmentation, the scientists argued that the dinosaur butt may have played a role in “visual signalling,” similar to the butts of living baboons and breeding salamanders.

Scientists say this was done possibly for mating and courtship.

They also argue that the large, pigmented lobes on the sides of the cloaca could have harboured scent glands, just like alligators and other living crocodilians.

The scientists say that the new findings are “a game changer,” and the fact that they now know that some dinosaurs were signalling with their butts will lead to more research into dinosaur courtship.