Madagascar! Fossa also have extremely long, spiny penises. Females in heat hang out in a tree and pick their mates from the gathered horde of wooing admirers. "Next! You, with the orange belly, up here!" Mating can take three hours, and the male may stay to cuddle for an hour or so after. Those are my Favorite Fossa Features (FFFs).
A couple of other interesting points: the males do have spiny (and unusually long) penises (with a penis bone); and the females have spiny clitorises (with a clitoris bone). More precisely, juvenile females have these characteristics. They recede with adulthood (even the clitoris bone shrinks). Oh, and that orange belly is the result of glandular secretions when a male is in rut; and juvenile females copy that too.
Are fossas the only animals with a clitoris bone?
From Wikipedia:
Mammals having a penile bone (in males) and a clitoral bone (in females) include various eutherians:
- Order Primates, although not in humans.
- Order Rodentia (rodents), though not in the related order Lagomorpha (rabbits, hares etc.).
- Order Insectivora (insectivores, including moles, shrews, and hedgehogs).
- Order Carnivora (including members of many well-known Families, such as Ursids (bears),[3] Felids (cats), Canids (dogs), Pinnipeds (Walruses, Seals, Sea Lions), Procyonids (Raccoons etc.), Mustelids (Otters, weasels, skunks and others)).
- Order Chiroptera (bats).
It is absent in humans, equids, elephants, monotremes, marsupials, lagomorphs, hyenas, and cetaceans (whales, dolphins, and porpoises), among others.
Such a wide distribution among placental mammals suggests that the bone evolved early in the history of these mammals, and was subsequently lost in certain groups.
Among the primates the marmoset, weighing around 500g, has a baculum measuring around 2mm, while the tiny 63g Galago has one around 13mm long. The Great Apes, despite their size, tend to have very small penis bones, and humans are the only ones to have lost them altogether.
Are fossas the only animals with a clitoris bone?
They are not, though it's a lot rarer than a penis bone. I believe it's been found in some squirrels, for instance.
Some of the animal folk who have lost it are sufficiently well-endowed, one would think they could use it. Why evolve it, only to discard it?
Also, is the plural of baculum "bacula"? I need to start a collection. "These are my bacula: cat, walrus, and scott."
This is making the song "The ankle bone's connected to the shin bone" sound a lot more interesting.
"These are my bacula: cat, walrus, and scott."
And of course, the extinct island version, Great Scott.
Kind of off-topic, but I found it amusing:
Our love is like Metro delays - neverending
I went to the dentist this morning because the painful tooth was still exceptionally painful. Turns out that it's *not* the tooth that had the broken filling repaired; it's the tooth behind it. The painful tooth had some deep fillings done in the past, and that can lead to damaged pulp and eventual root canal.
But the dentist told me to finish up the antibiotics she prescribed for the sinus infection, to see if that helps, because Monday's x-ray didn't show an abscess or anything weird with the painful tooth. (Though there doesn't necessarily need to be an abscess to indicate the need for a root canal.)
Anyway, I take the last antibiotic Friday morning; she said if there doesn't seem to be any improvement by noon-ish Friday, to call them and they'll get me in to figure it out.
So now I'm just chanting "Go, antibiotics, go!" in the back of my head. And chewing verrrrrry carefully.
yikes, Tep. But sounds better than more dental work.
