Can You Identify the Gender of Dinosaurs?

Amaze Lab

A team led by Queen Mary University of London researchers found it's actually very difficult to identify differences between sexes from dinosaur fossils, which challenges past studies.

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00:00 Identifying whether a dinosaur was male or female has been tough for paleontologists.

00:09 Now research led by Queen Mary University of London has found that despite past claims

00:14 of success, it's very hard to tell them apart.

00:17 The team studied skulls from modern-day gharials, a huge crocodilian species, to see if they

00:22 could distinguish between genders with only fossil records.

00:26 Researchers say they're a good model for extinct dinosaurs due to their size and growth rate.

00:30 Males are bigger than females and have a growth at the end of their snouts, which can be identified

00:35 in skulls with a bony hollow.

00:37 Looking at 106 specimens, they found that, even knowing this, it was still hard to tell

00:41 sexes apart.

00:43 And researchers say with dinosaurs, there's even less information to go on.

00:47 It's likely that dinosaurs had gender differences much like modern-day species, but the findings,

00:52 published in the journal PeerJ, show this is hard to see with just a skeleton.

00:56 This new research challenges past studies indicating ways to distinguish between sexes.

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