Its cavernosa merge into one while its spongiosa stay apart. The inverse of that happens in an echidna’s penis. Though the corpus cavernosum and spongiosum start off separate at the base, spongiosa eventually merge into one. The corpus cavernosum fills up with blood and allows it to hold an erection, while the corpus spongiosum is also filled with blood, but its primary function is to keep the urethra open for semen to pass through. Mammalian penises are made erectile tissues known as the corpus cavernosum and the corpus spongiosum. This has never been seen in a mammal before.” “Instead, we found that one of the main erectile tissues in mammalian penises makes up two completely separate structures, and they can control which side is active by directing blood flow. “I'd been expecting some sort of valve mechanism to control why they only use two heads instead of four,” Fenlon said. CT scans usually only pick up on hard tissue, like bone, to create 3D models, but staining the penile tissue with iodine allowed them to see soft tissue. They also had one tame echidna that was able to show off its skills. CT scans and several methods of microscopy revealed the mechanisms behind the function of the echidna penis. The penises of other mammals have had to evolve around allowing for both mating and urination, but not having to worry about one of these functions probably gave the echidna an an advantage in the mating department.Įven weirder is that only two of the heads, or glans, of an echidna’s penis operate at once, since that is all the female’s double-branched reproductive tract can accommodate.įenlon and her team from were able to study the penises of injured echidnas from the animal hospital at the Currumbin Wildlife Sanctuary, most of which ended up on the wrong end of a moving car and didn’t make it. Echidnas urinate from a cloaca and only bring out the four-headed monster during mating season. When not in use, the echidna’s penis is stashed internally, which makes it kind of like the amphibious humanoid creature in The Shape of Water. What an echidna's underside looks like.except when it's mating season. They probably evolved the ability to only use their penis for mating first, which gave them a lot more freedom to modify its structure.”
#A PLATYPUS PENIS FULL#
“Evolution is full of experiments in trying out different options. “It's difficult to say why they evolved the way they did,” she told SYFY WIRE.
Why male echidnas evolved a four-headed appendage that is only used for mating and not urination is unknown, but biologist Jane Fenlon of the University of Melbourne in Australia, who recently published a study in Sexual Development, has her own thoughts on how the peculiar penis could have evolved. They diverged from therian mammals, which include placentals like humans and marsupials, about 184 million years ago and ended up evolving some alien physical characteristics. Monotremes are the only known mammals (at least on this planet) that lay eggs. It seems almost as if monotremes like the echidna and platypus got lost in evolution and ended up as mammalian-reptilian mashups. That that still has nothing on what the males can pull off. These spiny creatures are beaked and toothless, have long tongues that stick to the insects they eat, and though they are mammals, the females lay eggs.
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