Human males walk upright, and it is thought that larger genitalia might have acted as a sexual attractant in competitive situations. The authors acknowledge that many questions remain: How much of the penis does the drake actually insert? And does the anatomy of the female make them unusually difficult to inseminate? 'A gorilla, for example, has a penis just 2 inches long. "They are being rather speculative, and it seems not much is known about this bird and we need to observe its behaviour in the wild before we can understand what function this penis might have," he said. Mulder agreed this was likely, but felt another suggestion by the authors - that males might use an everted penis as a "display" to attract females - was not. One finding in support of this idea, they suggest, is that the drake's penis has a brush-like tip, which they say the males probably use to scrub the sperm of previous mates from the female's oviduct. The authors write that this species is "promiscuous and boisterous in their sexual activity", which means that there is likely to be stiff competition by drakes to be the father of ducklings. "I'm not fond of the 'nudge nudge, wink wink' comments by the authors," he said. Most male birds don't have penises - they copulate by briefly touching genital openings, called a 'cloacal kiss'," he explained.ĭr Mulder said a number of duck species and ostriches have penises, but this was definitely the longest ever encountered.ĭr McCracken and colleagues speculate that the giant penis may be an example of 'runaway' sexual selection, where female preference drives male anatomy to ever-greater extremes, as in the peacock's tail.ĭr Mulder believes this may be a bit of anthropomorphising, however. It really is unusual," commented bird mating expert Dr Raoul Mulder from the University of Melbourne. "It's a fascinating bit of anatomy they've discovered here. This has extended an earlier estimate of the length of the duck's corkscrew-shaped penis, which was 20cm.
It measures 1.5 in an orangutan, three inches in a chimpanzee, and five inches in a man. North American scientists have discovered the longest bird penis ever - a 42.5cm organ belonging to a duck.ĭr Kevin McCracken of the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, and colleagues, report in this week's Nature that they have found a specimen of the Argentine lake duck ( Oxyura vittata) that has a penis as long as its body - nearly half a metre long. To move on to some specific measurements, the average length of an erect penis in a gorilla is 1.25 in. Gorillas make a splash, Science Online,.Big bottomed baboons make better mates, Science Online,.Grunters not guffawers get the girl, Science Online,.
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