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The animal kingdom
The female spotted hyena has a phallus
She urinates, mates and gives birth through the same organ.
Photo:
Charles J. Sharp
· CC BY-SA 4.0 · Wikimedia Commons
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the female's phallus
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17 cm
the female's phallus
The female spotted hyena has an enlarged clitoris around seventeen centimetres long, externally almost indistinguishable from the male's penis, and a fused false scrotum. She has no external vaginal opening. Urination, copulation and birth all happen through the phallus.
It makes mating physically impossible without her cooperation — the male cannot achieve anything by force — and it makes first births dangerous: the canal tears, and a substantial share of firstborn cubs do not survive. Spotted hyena clans are female-dominated, and the anatomy is thought to be a side effect of the androgen levels that come with it.
Did you know
Early naturalists concluded from the anatomy that hyenas were hermaphrodites that changed sex each year. Aristotle dismissed the claim in the fourth century BC after examining one, and the belief persisted for another two thousand years regardless.
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