Precocious Dinosaur Sex : Laelaps

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Laelaps is the blog of Brian Switek, a freelance science writer based in New Jersey. This blog frequently features his musings on paleontology, evolution, and the history of science. Switek also blogs for Smithsonian magazine's Dinosaur Tracking.

Switek's first book, Written in Stone, will be published on November 1, 2010 by Bellevue Literary Press.

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Precocious Dinosaur Sex

Category: Dinosaurs • Shameless Plug
Posted on: January 15, 2008 11:26 AM, by Brian Switek

Part of the reason why I love science blogging is that there are usually enough people with interest in a particular field that a lot more research gets covered over the whole blogosphere than any one author could accomplish alone. While I'm still mired in some papers I downloaded last week, Darren has posted a new (and fascinating) piece on "teenage pregnancy" in dinosaurs. You'll have to see Tetrapod Zoology for the details, but be sure to stop by PNAS and get the paper "Sexual maturity in growing dinosaurs does not fit reptilian growth models," by Lee and Werning, too. If you recall, Erickson et al. published a paper ("Growth patterns in brooding dinosaurs reveals the timing of sexual maturity in non-avian dinosaurs and genesis of the avian condition," in Biology Letters) on the same topic last year that seems to support the idea that dinosaurs were reproductively mature before they attained fully adult body size, a pattern that differs from both other reptiles and from modern birds. These findings certainly will have bearing on the debate surrounding dinosaur metabolic rates and endothermy, especially since the new PNAS paper suggests that earlier sexual maturity in dinosaurs (as evidenced by medullary bone) might be a trait that goes all the way back to the saurischian/ornithischian split rather than being a trait associated only with theropods. I've probably already said too much, but it's definitely some big news and I'm looking forward to more research on this topic in a greater variety of dinosaurs.

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Comments

Hey! I blogged about this yesterday too, but it won't publish 'til Science Friday. Thanks for the additional papers & discussions to link to.

Posted by: RedMolly | January 15, 2008 4:37 PM

I can't wait for someone to cite this as proof of Intelligent Design--or at least Intelligent Extinction (IE). Clearly, dinosaurs were struck down for their promiscuous ways. It's a lesson we should all heed.

Posted by: John McKay | January 16, 2008 5:48 PM

F*cking dinosaurs!

Sorry...somebody had to say it...

Posted by: yogi-one | January 16, 2008 8:44 PM

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