12. Psittacosaurus
This is the type of dinosaur that doesn’t often make it into children’s books—and that’s not just because the animal’s preserved “butthole” was recently found in China. To the untrained eye, Psittacosaurus looks like an average herbivorous dinosaur, which isn’t great fodder for non-expert illustrations.
But fossils of the animal (whose name means “parrot-resembling lizard”) reveal a substantial amount about dinosaur ecology and anatomy. Researchers studying the Liaoning fossil found that the animals were countershaded, a type of coloration that many animals employ today. And that’s even before you get to its preserved cloaca, the soft-tissue multipurpose opening the animal used for defecation, urination, and laying eggs.
No preserved dinosaur penis has ever been found. But the psittacosaurus deserves some recognition for getting as close as we’ve come to one.
