Dave Hone

But, like, you know, there's population differences.

You know, there are maned female lions in places.

There are maneless male lions in places.

Reindeer.

Female reindeer have antlers in winter.

So Rudolph was a girl, because every illustration of Santa and his reindeer ever, they all have antlers.

And that's a female reindeer, not a male, if it's winter.

So basically, we don't know much about the dating and the sex lives of T-Rexes.

Well, not much, but you can make some inferences.

So, for example...

Um, all Tyrannosaurs, uh, have at least some kind of crest on the head.

The early ones have like this midline, it really doesn't work on a human.

They have like a midline crest running along the top of the nose that sticks up.

The later ones largely don't, but they do have this weird armored structure along those fused nasals.

And then they have little horns over the eyes.

Those, as far as we can tell, don't really have any kind of obvious mechanical function.

And loads, like outside of the feathered dinosaurs, the vast majority of carnivorous dinosaurs have some kind of crest or display feature on the head.

or something like that.

So I've always favored the term socio-sexual selection to cover both sexual display and sexual dominance and communication, but also social ones, because those two things are hard to tell apart.

Female lions find males with darker manes sexier, but male lions find males with darker manes more intimidating.