09-23-2003, 11:56 AM
|
 |
Pixie's Resident Reptile
|
|
Join Date: Jul 2002
Location: Central MD, USA
Posts: 21,192
|
|
|
You think YOU'RE old & shriveled
Oldest genital fossils found in Scotland
Tuesday, September 23, 2003
The fossil remnants closely resemble modern day Harvestmen arachnids, known as daddy long legs.
New Scientist
LONDON (Reuters) -- Scientists have discovered fossils of the world's oldest genitals -- belonging to a 400 million-year-old arachnid -- in ancient rocks in Scotland.
The penis of the ancient harvestmen insects, commonly known as a daddy-long-legs, was two-thirds the length of the body and remarkably similar to the modern-day species, New Scientist magazine said.
"The discovery of the world's oldest genitals proves that little has changed over the last 400 million years -- at least for daddy-long-legs," the magazine said.
Jason Dunlop and a team of researchers from Humbolt University in Berlin, Germany, who will present their findings at a conference in Aberdeen, also uncovered a long egg-laying organ called an ovipositor from a female.
New Scientist
"As well as genitals, the fossils have the oldest known arachnid respiratory system, suggesting harvestmen's ancestors had long since crawled out of the sea and learned to breathe," the magazine said Wednesday.
Harvestmen arachnids are sometimes mistaken for spiders but they are more closely related to ticks or mites because they do not spin webs.
The previous oldest penis, which dated back 100 million years and was found in Brazil, belonged an ostracod, an early crustacean related to crabs, shrimps and water fleas.
__________________
On the kinkometer, my kink measures as a sine wave.
|
Linear Mode
