We now return to our occasionally-scheduled Thank God It’s Penis Friday. The alligator harvest at Louisiana’s Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge happened every September, so in the fall of 2007, Diane Kelly packed her bags. She wasn’t hunting, but she still had to put her scalpels and knife blades and the rest of her dissection kit in […]
Special series
First, a disclaimer. This is the kind of discussion that happens when friends talk evolutionary biology over a bottle of wine. (Specifically, me, my husband Dave–whose knowledge of evolution comes from reading New Scientist magazine — and our friend Kevin.) Christie: Penises make no sense. They’re floppy, vulnerable appendages and males spend an inordinate amount […]
This week on LWON’s occasional series Thank God It’s Penis Friday, we bring you wisdom from not one but two authors of newly released books about private parts. (Count your blessings, people.) Florence Williams is the author of BREASTS: A Natural and Unnatural History; Jesse Bering is the author of Why Is the Penis Shaped Like That? And […]
It’s time for another edition of Thank God It’s Penis Friday! As many as 99 percent of us get a song stuck in our heads at some point. This may happen because the song sparks a cognitive itch or because it contains a repetitive motif that the brain latches onto and starts echoing. Researchers have a name […]
Slugs have sex. You probably already knew that. And if you read my last post on banana slugs’ strange sexual appetites, you had the rare opportunity to see a slug penis. So you already know what the organ looks like. Except you don’t! That was a trick statement. You know what a banana slug’s penis looks like. […]
The fifth in the occasional series, Thank God It’s Penis Friday. In the winter of 1996, I was inducted into the research team at Marine World Africa USA’s Marine Research Center like everybody else – with a clipboard. On it was a list of dolphin behaviors that I would spend the next three months watching. […]
Behold the bed bug penis. Entomologists call it a lanceolate paramere, where lanceolate means “shaped like a lance head” and paramere, the “copulatory hooks formed from outer subdivision of primary phallic lobes.” Put more simply, it curves out from the tip of the male’s abdomen and ends in a wicked point, like a dagger. This […]
This is the third installment of the occasional series Thank God It’s Penis Friday. The first was on banana slug sex; the second on Iceland’s Phallological Museum. Today we are going to talk about penis bones. The penis bone, or baculum, is the supportive bone in the penises of most mammals. Relax, you didn’t miss anything: humans […]