Ann Jones

It's a numbers game.

Maybe some of them will make it.

Biologists call this an R strategy.

On the other hand, there are K strategists.

Fewer babies, but they look after them more carefully.

They do a lot more parental care before and or after hatching.

But that means that each kid is increasingly important, right?

Each individual kid takes more of your resources.

So you have to be way more careful about whose gametes you're mixing your own with.

You do not want to be bringing up a nupties son.

This drive is what will give rise to most of the things that you hold dear in this world.

Dancing to a cumbia, birdsong, being absolutely ripped, diamond rings, colourful beetles, eating a spaghetti strand from each end and coming together.

All of this has to do with gamete selection.

So back to the fossils.

We've got eggs being brooded internally, right?

Which leads me to ask, well, how did they get fertilised?

Does it mean that we, what the dark time explorers, are on the cusp of finding the very first penis?

David Siviter is a rock hard sort of guy, an emeritus professor of paleontology at the University of Leicester.

That is old, a good 200 million years before T-Rex, in the Ordovacian period, where the weather was warm, the world was moist, most of the land was in the southern hemisphere in Gondwana, and the sea level was much, much higher than it was today.

In fact, at the equator, the sea might have reached 40 degrees Celsius.