Dinosaur sex? Macalester expert weighs in on graphic depictions [PHOTOS]

Jose Antonio Penas, Science Photo Library

Birds, bees, T-Rexes.

Dinosaur sex is going viral. Last week, online newspaper the Huffington Post and London's Daily Mail both ran articles on dino mating, complete with headline puns ("The joy of T-Rex") and illustrated slideshows so detailed that the HuffPo asked, "dinosaur science--or dinosaur porn?"

Along with the drawings was a quote from paleontologist and Macalester professor Kristi Curry Rogers, on how the specifics of the act played out.

"The most likely position to have intercourse is for the male behind the female, and on top of her, and from behind," she said. "Any other position is unfathomable."

The line is from the Discovery Channel's 2008 video, "Tyrannosaurus Sex," for which Rogers was an on-camera expert. But turns out, even scientific shows leave a lot of context on the cutting room floor. We called up Rogers and talked about the drawings in those slideshows, whether dinosaur sex is really a paleo specialty, and boycotting the Discovery Channel video.

Do you think the drawings are as wacky as the rest of us do?
I think they're a riot! I will definitely find them useful teaching my class at Macalester, for laughs. I appreciate the artistry--that artist had a lot of time--but I do prefer illustrations of dinosaurs in their ecosystem, not ones that are entirely for shock value. There's a whole field of paleo-illustrators.

At least the drawing of the two T. rexes mating does have some scientific acuity. Both are depicted with a feathery body covering, which is right in line with ideas about dinosaurs and the evolutionary origin of birds, as well as recent discoveries.

Jose Antonio Penas, Science Photo Library

Rogers cries fake.

How are scientific illustrations different?
The kinds of illustrators I work with focus on the science. Sure, there is a lot of imagination involved in dinosaur drawing. But if I were writing a paper on dinosaur biology, I would have an artist working with me on details; for instance, how a certain type of tissue in the skeleton could indicate that the dinosaur was female. And so the artist might draw a dinosaur laying eggs, but that would be because that dino was preparing to lay eggs at the moment it died.

How much of your own work focuses on dinosaur mating?
No one studies dinosaur sex! To us, it's not even all that interesting. Clearly dinos had sex. There were wildly successful biological organisms who were on this planet far longer than humans have been.

There are people who work on the potential signals in dinosaur skeletons that might indicate whether individuals are male or female. But there aren't many complete dinosaur skeletons. You can look at the few there are and say, okay, a female has these plates; a male doesn't have them. Paleontologists interested in these questions are only dealing with bones. Most of the time we don't focus on trying to reconstruct the soft parts of the reproductive anatomy, because there is no clear way to know. Even when we look at the closest living relatives of dinosaurs and birds, there is such an amazing variety that there is no clear answer about what might've been going on with dinosaurs. That said, there have been a few finds that allow us to address the sex of a particular dinosaur specimen. For instance, if you find a skeleton where there were still eggs in the position of the oviduct, and you can say definitively, that's a female. So people do that sort of work, but answering such a complicated question is really rare... at least so far.