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Bird Eggs Need Extra Sperm To Make Chicks
You know the story of mammalian fertilisation: millions of sperm enter the vagina, only one fertilises the egg, more than one messes up the embryo, yadda yadda yadda. Turns out that’s not the only way it can work.
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Giving Birth Through Its Anus Is The Least Weird Thing About This Ribbon Worm
Look here. An American marine ribbon worm is giving birth.
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A Reptile With No Penis Just Solved A Baffling Scientific Mystery
The tuatara isn’t actually a lizard. It’s the last survivor of a 250 million year old group of reptiles that mostly went extinct with the dinosaurs. It doesn’t have a penis, and ironically, that’s made it a linchpin for understanding how penises evolved in vertebrates.
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Catherine Scott Spent All Of Friday Afternoon Waiting For Her Spiders To Have Sex
Catherine Scott is a graduate student working toward her Ph.D. at the University of Toronto. She’s studying the courtship behaviour of black widow spiders. That means that her experiments often involve waiting for spiders to have sex.