Dave Hone

So going way, way back to a conversation about telling males and females apart.

And I said, big problem is

population data or at least the number of specimens that you have when basically you've only got one two or three um i did a big study on this a few years ago on garyos the really long snouted crocodilians from nepal and india and pakistan with a giant bulge on the end of the nose and even though the males are all bigger than the females and the males all have this weird nose growth though that's mostly soft tissue but they have a weird depression in the jaw

in the end of the snout where the nostrils sit.

We got a sample size of something like about 110 animals.

So these are very, very rare animals.

So we had to ransack every museum worldwide.

I was sending, my students sending emails to huge numbers of people.

Have you got one sitting in your collection lost?

Can you get it for us?

Can you take these photos or these measurements?

We can measure it.

We put the data set together.

And then we found that actually, apart from the very biggest males, it's really hard to tell males and females apart.

And this actually really closely matched some modeling data that I'd done with a colleague, Jordan Mallon in Ottawa, looking at this for alligators and trying to compare it to dinosaurs.

Because though we talked about mutual sexual selection before...

Mutual sexual selection in particular, you tend to get things that are extremely similar.

Males and females are very hard to tell apart.

But there's also, there's a gradient, you know, all the way up to things like peacocks, all the way down to you can't tell them apart, like parrots.

And for some features, when they take time to get growing, or because dinosaurs grow over a very long window and are sexually mature over a very long window, you run into the problem that a big female will look like a small male.