Clever girl... or boy?

“There always comes a stage when you have to run.” From killer hornets, to bushfires and a global pandemic, if 2020 has taught us anything, it’s to expect the unexpected and always listen to the experts. If dinosaurs end up attacking, I’m taking advice from Sam Neill, who plays Dr Alan Grant in the Jurassic Park films. “The thing about dinosaurs, and I know this from close experience,” he told podcasters Fitzy and Wippa, “is that they run faster than any living human being.”

But Dr Alan Grant was never really the star of the show. The real stars are the fierce female dinosaurs, from the infamous T-Rex in Jurassic Park, to the ferocious raptors in Jurassic World. In fact, all the dinosaurs created by the scientists in the films are female - to prevent them breeding if they ever escaped. But as Dr Malcolm famously told us: “Life finds a way.” Thanks to some rogue DNA, the dinosaurs started breeding without males.

And things haven’t been as simple for palaeontologists in the real world either.

A new study at Queen Mary University of London has found that, despite previous claims of success, it is incredibly difficult to tell male and female dinosaurs apart.

“Many years ago, a scientific paper suggested that female T. rex are bigger than male,” said the lead author, Dr Hone, talking about a previous paper which sampled 25 incomplete fossils. “Our results show this level of data just isn’t good enough to be able to make this conclusion.”

The team looked at the fossils of modern-day gharials, a critically endangered species of crocodilian that lives in South Asia. The males are larger than the females and have a ghara, a fleshy growth on their snouts – so large that it leaves a dent on the bone. The researchers found that it was only this prior knowledge that allowed them to tell the difference between the fossils, they simply wouldn’t have been able to differentiate based on size alone.

That’s why it’s so difficult with dinosaurs, says Dr Andrew Knapp, a researcher at the Natural History Museum in London. “When we’re looking at fossils, we don’t know beforehand which is which, so we can’t point out male or female, which we have the luxury of in living species.” But there are different approaches which may prove to be more useful such as shape, he adds.

The field is certainly growing, but thankfully it looks like there’s a long way to go before the dystopic Jurassic World can open its gates.