It's rare to get a look at something soft and fleshy on a dinosaur

...as your mom well knows.

On the fossil, just below the tail, the butthole appears as a "blackish mottled ovoid area," the paleontologists write. To the naked eye, the spot looks like a series of dark, stacked bands running between the base of the tail and hip bones, clearly different from the skin around it. [...]

Bird cloacae are round or square and normally covered up by feathers. Crocodiles and alligators, which are the closest living cousins of dinosaurs, have cloacae that are horizontal slits. [...] An educated guess is great, but firm evidence is better.

...as your mom well knows.

Though the drainpipes stashed behind the cloaca itself were not preserved -- the penis in this setup, just so you can picture it, extends out of the butthole during mating -- this fossil helps us imagine that dinosaurs might have had croclike genitalia, too. In crocodiles the female's clitoris is so large and pronounced that the pink, tapering organs can easily be confused for the male's penis.

...as your mom well knows.

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