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Why Fossils Are Mostly Male
- _red 7y agoStrange that they haven't considered chemical reasons: Males have more iron / more hemoglobin...perhaps male bones are just more likely to fossilize for some chemical reason(s)?
- ASalazarMX 7y agoThere wouldn't be small fossils if blood volume was that important to bone fossilization.
- andonisus 7y ago> "This has less to do with misogyny" How did they shoehorn in sexism into an article about animals? This has nothing to do with misogyny because animals are incapable of reason.
- ptah 7y agoit's a joke
- zihotki 7y agoOr is it?
- ptah 7y agothe plot thickens
- andonisus 7y agoI don't see the humor.
- tantalor 7y agoExplaining the joke to you: Whenever we discover unexpected bias due to sex we usually first assume sexism at work, but that's funny here because ancient megafauna aren't sexist.
- andonisus 7y agoI understand why it might be considered a joke, but it doesn't make sense (and is not funny), because the subject in question is not human.
- gameswithgo 7y agoIs it possible you are too caught up in being triggered about gender issues to find anything funny, anymore?
- spidermango 7y agonot everyone has a sense of humor
- whamlastxmas 7y agoBe careful, you don't want to get Stallman'd
- daveFNbuck 7y agoThe sexism would be coming from the people collecting fossils and curating the museums. Later in the article they mention that human biases affect the gender ratios of collections of extant organisms (although not for sexist reasons) so it's not a completely absurd thing to rule out.
- andonisus 7y agoSo the argument would be the the (male) paleontologists, museum curators, etc. had such a burning hatred for women that they chose male specimens to cultivate and display?
- black_puppydog 7y agoor simply that male subjects are for some reason or another easier to present in an interesting way, as decided by curators etc of any gender.
- andonisus 7y agoHow would that be a case of misogyny, then?
- daveFNbuck 7y agoIt isn't. No one is saying that it is.
- salad77 7y agoYou've got it, there's even a paper on this regarding glaciology see https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0309132515623368 https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/030913251562336...
- andonisus 7y agoI (unfortunately) cannot access this paper because it is behind a paywall, but surely it must be satire?
- gameswithgo 7y ago> because animals are incapable of reason. hmm
- hirundo 7y ago> [Male wooly mammoths] were more likely to do silly things, like die in tar pits Apparently, across many mammalian species, males are more likely to take risks and explore than females. This seems to be good evidence that not all gendered behavior is socialized. That would seem to be a silly straw man argument to knock down, if it were not so widely held.
- empthought 7y agoMales are certainly more likely to be ostracized for aggressive behavior in social species... why assume their apparent solitude is because they are “taking risks and exploring” instead of having nowhere else to go?
- brosinante 7y agoHow dare you injure my tiny fragile male ego thusly.
- dymk 7y agoThe comment you’re responding to only suggests that some behavior is related to biological sex and not socialized, and doesn’t call out any particular behavior.
- empthought 7y agoIt specifically calls out “taking risks” and “exploring.”
- dymk 7y agoThose are pretty general, nonspecific traits, unlike “enjoys tar pits”
- PunchTornado 7y agoyour comment seems to suggest that animals aren't social and their behaviour is pure biological.
- magashna 7y agoI would assume bone structure is generally bigger and stronger, lasting longer
- moate 7y agoI can't imagine there's such substantial sexual diamorphism across all species to account for that. How much bigger/stronger would bones need to be for this to hold true? Also, what about the variance between species? Hypothetically, would that then go Male Large Dino > Female Large Dino > Male Medium Dino > Female Medium Dino...? We'd expect to see more females of large dinos than any medium males in that case.
- ASalazarMX 7y agoThe article mentions 25% of fossils are female. Females would need 75% less bone mass to account for that.
- moate 7y agoThat's not quite how the math works. Assuming there was a size/mass minimum for fossilization, and that we expected that to be the only qualifier for fossil occurrence, we'd just need to expect X% of species to exhibit sexual dimorphism depending on how frequently we see males&females of the same species. For example, if you needed a bone to weigh 5kg/meter and males are 5kg/meter but females are 4.5kg/meter then you'd expect to see a very low number of females even though they're only 10% smaller. Obviously none of this is the case, and this isn't the deciding factor on why it's happening. Just pointing out where you missed things slightly.
- ASalazarMX 7y agoYou're right, but that doesn't fit in a snarky one-liner. If we were serious about this bone mass minimum, we'd need to consider why there are fossils of smaller animals, or big but hollow-boned animals. That's a rabbit hole with many hypothetical variables.
- hsnewman 7y agoCould females be eaten more so there is less remains?
- Majestic121 7y agoMost animals don't eat bone though
- londons_explore 7y agoThis article misses some steps... Just because a male might be likely to go do something risky and die young, that wouldn't explain more male fossils. After all, the female that didn't do something risky will also die. All things die. Are they trying to claim that females who die are less likley to turn into fossils, perhaps because of the locations the deaths occurred in?
- shantly 7y agoFossilization of bone generally requires animals to die such that they're buried pretty quickly. The swampier parts of swamps, river banks, tar pits, that sort of thing. Risky areas for megafauna, not places they're going to be, say, sleeping if they can avoid it. The exceptions are when there were, for example, flash floods that quickly swept & covered ordinarily-safe-and-fertile flood plains, or when predators dragged carcasses to such places for whatever reason (big crocodiles, maybe), volcanic eruptions, stuff like that. A large land animal killed not by some disaster, that ended up fossilized, probably didn't die of old age or of predation by something common to the animal's preferred habitat, unless they were (for example) swamp dwellers to begin with. [edit] > Are they trying to claim that females who die are less likley to turn into fossils, perhaps because of the locations the deaths occurred in? Yes, I think that's it.
- gameswithgo 7y agoI don't understand the argument. All mammoths die.
- shantly 7y ago1) location of death (or final resting place, anyway) matters a ton for likelihood of fossilization, 2) not all animals die in the same places, 3) if sex has an influence on the distribution of likelihood of dying (or ending up in—water carries corpses, predators and carrion-eaters may drag them) in fossilization-friendly locations, we'd expect to see a difference in the rates of fossil discovers of that species by sex, different from whatever actual distribution there was of male & female in the original population.
- bcta1 7y agointeresting article on this topic: http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180215-how-does-fossilisation-happen http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20180215-how-does-fossilisat...
- stan_rogers 7y agoYes, but not all mammoths fossilize. Fossilization is rare. Most deaths result in recycling the animal into nutrients for other things (animals, fungi and bacteria). For land animals, fossilization involves either dying under circumstances that are likely to promote fossilization or under circumstances that are likely to quickly move your body to a location that allows fossilization. Getting stuck in a quagmire or tar pit, or getting swept away trying to ford deep, fast-moving water drives your chances of fossilization up considerably.
- cjdrake 7y agoThe patriarchy strikes again.