Why Fossils Are Mostly Male

https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/fossil-record-prefers-males

by mellowhype • 7 years ago

56 77 7 years ago

andonisus8• 7 years 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.

ptah2• 7 years ago

it's a joke

zihotki• 7 years ago

Or is it?

andonisus8• 7 years ago

I don't see the humor.

daveFNbuck7• 7 years ago

The 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.

andonisus8• 7 years ago

So 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?

tantalor2• 7 years ago

That theory is excluded earlier in the article: If you’re lucky enough to have a whole bone, such as a skull, the size, shape, and dimensions might differ between male and female. In the case of fragments, researchers might have to dig into DNA

If obvious differences are very rare ("very lucky") then the bias can not come from collectors.

gameswithgo3• 7 years ago

because animals are incapable of reason.

hmm

hirundo• 7 years 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.

empthought4• 7 years ago

Males 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• 7 years ago

How dare you injure my tiny fragile male ego thusly.

dymk3• 7 years ago

The 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.

roenxi• 7 years ago

Aggressive behaviour is extremely risky, the payoffs and costs are both very high. And indeed, one of the potential costs is social ostracism. It counts under the taking risks part of 'taking risks and exploring'.

vecplane• 7 years ago

A related theory is the Greater Male Variability Hypothesis - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Variability_hypothesis

The idea being that males tend to have flatter/wider distributions of traits, leading to higher populations at the extremes of those traits. This can include aggression, risk aversion, etc.

More at the Heterodox Academy - https://heterodoxacademy.org/the-greater-male-variability-hy...

eloff3• 7 years ago

It is a silly straw man argument that should be knocked down. Society has completely lost it trying to ignore science and claim that there's no biological differences between genders. It's a joke if you're even slightly educated on the subject.

mcv3• 7 years ago

Is anyone claiming that there are no biological differences between genders? It's very blatantly obvious that there are. I think the idea that many people oppose, is that the existence of some biological differences justifies other social differences.

danharaj• 7 years ago

Society has completely lost it trying to ignore science and claim that there's no biological differences between genders.

Could you describe in more detail some specific claims you've seen made that fall under this?

everdev• 7 years ago

Knowing the common predispositions of genders is useful if you need to make an educated guess about the expected behavior of a random person.

Sometimes the problem lies in trying to raise boys or girls to fit these "expected predispositions". Or judging someone who is "outside their gender norm".

So, yes if I pick a random boy and girl out of a crowd, I would expect differences and could make reasonable guesses about those differences.

So, it's not bad if you know these common gender differences as long as you are able to quickly discard them when you're getting to know someone at a deeper level than their gender.

danaris• 7 years ago

The reason some people claim this is twofold:

First, that contrary to prior common belief, the range of possible physical strength, endurance, pain tolerance, and all types of personality expressions of women is effectively the same as that for men.

Second, that regardless of scientific evidence, the belief in differences between the sexes has been very widely used to oppress women in so many ways, including but in no way limited to prohibiting them from voting, limiting what types of job they were legally permitted to hold, and effectively treating them as the property of their husbands or fathers, with no will or agency of their own.

Until the generations that were actively involved in doing these things finish dying out, and probably the ones that were taught by them, too, claiming there is no biological difference between men and women, regardless of its veracity, will be a completely justifiable defense mechanism against being told to shut up and make sandwiches for the rest of their lives.

PunchTornado2• 7 years ago

that not all gendered behavior is socialized

animals also live in societies, complex societies in cases of elephants. it can be that those behaviours are learned in those societies.

nobody says that gendered behaviour is caused by society norms only in humans.

magashna• 7 years ago

I would assume bone structure is generally bigger and stronger, lasting longer

moate2• 7 years ago

I 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.

ASalazarMX3• 7 years ago

The article mentions 25% of fossils are female. Females would need 75% less bone mass to account for that.

moate2• 7 years ago

That'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.

_red• 7 years ago

Strange 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)?

ASalazarMX3• 7 years ago

There wouldn't be small fossils if blood volume was that important to bone fossilization.

hsnewman• 7 years ago

Could females be eaten more so there is less remains?

Majestic121• 7 years ago

Most animals don't eat bone though

londons_explore• 7 years ago

This 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?

shantly2• 7 years ago

Fossilization 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.

gameswithgo3• 7 years ago

I don't understand the argument. All mammoths die.

shantly2• 7 years ago

1) 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.

stan_rogers• 7 years ago

Yes, 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• 7 years ago

The patriarchy strikes again.

Why Fossils Are Mostly Male

Related Stories