Study Dinosaur Reproduction, Researchers Conduct Studies on Dinosaur Cloacal Fossils All

KOMPAS.com – Reproduction dinosaur is still a mystery to this day. The lack of samples makes the region very rarely studied.

And one thing that can be done to reveal how dinosaurs reproduce is by studying their cloaca.

cloaca is a hole used for urination, defecation, mating, and laying eggs. Cloacas are common throughout the animal kingdom today.

All birds, amphibians, reptiles, and even some mammals have cloaca. But we know very little about the dinosaur cloaca, its anatomy, what it looked like, and how the animal used it.

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To find out, researchers also conducted a study of the cloacal fossils of the Psittacosaurus dinosaur that lived 120 million years ago.

The specimen is the only non-avian dinosaur fossil known to have a preserved cloaca. Unfortunately, its internal anatomy has not been preserved due to the unsupportive position of the fossils.

This means that there isn’t much information that researchers can quantify, such as features that can reveal the sex of a dinosaur.

“We found that the cloaca looks different in many groups of tetrapods. But in most cases the hole can’t reveal the sex of the animal,” said Diane Kelly, an expert on animal reproduction and anatomy at the University of Massachusetts Amherst.

“The sex-distinguishing feature was tucked away in the cloaca and unfortunately not preserved in this fossil.”

However, the external part of the cloaca can be seen, so it contains some sufficient clues to know what the dinosaur’s cloaca looked like and how it was used.

Quoting from Science Alert, Wednesday (23/3/2022) researchers call the dinosaur cloaca unlike other modern animals. But the team was able to identify some similarities with reptiles and birds.

The dinosaur cloaca had dorsal lobes that looked similar to the cloacal protrusions of birds.

In addition, the cloaca has lateral lips on either side of the opening, just like crocodiles do. Another feature similar to that of a crocodile is that the lips of the cloaca are covered in small, overlapping scales that are highly pigmented with melanin.

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Furthermore, with limited data, the researchers were ultimately unable to determine whether the fossil was a male or female dinosaur.

But the colorful lobes suggest that the common ancestor of birds was related to non-avian dinosaurs.

Paleontologists are also trying to find other cloaca to provide a greater understanding of social life and dinosaur reproduction.

Research published in Current Biology.

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