Origins of sex discovered: Side-by-side copulation

[Dolorian]

A profound new discovery announced in Nature today by palaeontologist, Flinders University Professor John Long, reveals how the intimate act of sexual intercourse first evolved in our deep distant ancestors.

In one of the biggest discoveries in the evolutionary history of sexual reproduction, Professor Long has found that internal fertilisation and copulation appeared in ancient armoured fishes, called placoderms, about 385 million years ago in what is now Scotland.

Placoderms, the most primitive jawed vertebrates, are the earliest vertebrate ancestors of humans. Published in Nature, the discovery shows that male fossils of the Microbrachius dicki, which belong to the antiarch group of placoderms, developed bony L-shaped genital limbs called claspers to transfer sperm to females; and females developed small paired bones to lock the male organs in place for mating.

Source

[Endo]

Docking bones.

[downbeatplumb]

So sex originated millions of years ago in Scotland and not, as previously thought, London in the sixties.

[Anomalocaris]

So sex originated millions of years ago in Scotland and not, as previously thought, London in the sixties.

What did you think the Scots were doing with their sheep in the centuries before the sixities?

[downbeatplumb]

So sex originated millions of years ago in Scotland and not, as previously thought, London in the sixties.

What did you think the Scots were doing with their sheep in the centuries before the sixities?

Tearing out their stomachs, filling then with oats and cooking and eating them when they weren't making kilts from their wool.