like…seriously.
A bird phallus is similar — but not identical — to a mammalian penis. Most of the time it remains invisible, curled up inside a bird’s body. During mating, however, it fills with lymphatic fluid and expands into a long, corkscrew shape. The bird’s sperm travels on the outside of the phallus, along a spiral-shaped groove, into the female bird.
To learn about this peculiar organ, Dr. Brennan decided she would have to make careful dissections of male tinamous. In 2005 she traveled to the University of Sheffield to learn the art of bird dissection from Tim Birkhead, an evolutionary biologist. Dr. Birkhead had her practice on some male ducks from a local farm.
Gazing at the enormous organs, she asked herself a question that apparently no one had asked before.
“So what does the female look like?†she said. “Obviously you can’t have something like that without some place to put it in. You need a garage to park the car.â€
The lower oviduct (the equivalent of the vagina in birds) is typically a simple tube. But when Dr. Brennan dissected some female ducks, she discovered they had a radically different anatomy. “There were all these weird structures, these pockets and spirals,†she said.
seriously and completely fucked up. and who would ever want to study the hows and why of duck genitalia? does it have a purpose? at all?! wait…i don’t even want to know.
