Dave Hone

Mm-hmm.

And we can't sex them.

And lo and behold, this is what you get with the gharials.

The really big males are obvious because they're so much bigger and they've got this big depression in the snout.

But medium-sized and big females look like medium-sized or smaller males and very small males.

And so, yeah, that's basically what we have with dinosaurs.

Even with Protoceratops, where we've got a data set of like 100...

papers have come out saying there's very mild sexual dimorphism or there isn't sexual dimorphism.

Sexual dimorphism could be very strong in Protoceratops, but we can't find it because we can't tell the males from the females because we haven't ID'd enough through something like medullary bone.

And so you're in this horrible situation where, because going back to the T-Rex thing is like, well, maybe it's mutual sexual selection and therefore they're cooperating.

And that would be cool.

But also maybe males are much bigger, but we can't tell because our data set's too small.

In which case they're not under mutual sexual selection and we've got it all wrong.

It's maddening because it's so, if these were living animals, you just watch them or you just genotype them or you sex them and you just know.

And we just don't.

But on the other hand, we do have the mechanism to do it.

There are a handful of places where you get a bunch of predaceratops together, where it's a mass mortality site.

Well, let's go and drill every bone.

Because if that's the breeding season, we might find seven or eight females, and then the others are pretty much by default males, if we know it's the middle of the breeding season, because all the others have medullary bone.

And now you know where your male-female split is.