Alligators Sport Permanently Erect Penis Inside their Body

A latest study reveals a very mysterious aspect of an alligator: the semi-aquatic carnivorous reptile has a permanently erect penis hidden inside its body, an aspect uncommon in other reptiles and mammals, reports LiveScience.

The fully erect penis of an alligator consists of tough fibrous tissue that spurts out of its body and is retrieved back at equal speed.

"It is really interesting and really bizarre, very different from anything we've seen in vertebrates," study author Diane Kelly, an anatomist at the University of Massachusetts was quoted as saying in LiveScience.

She continues to say that not much information is available on how alligators mate. In order to uncover this mystery, she got some dead American alligators from the Rockefeller Wildlife Refuge in Louisiana. She dissected one that was more than 13 feet long and noticed a 7 centimeter long pasty white phallus hidden inside the reptiles waste and reproductive orifice called cloaca, reports Live Science.

On dissecting the penile tissue, she noticed that the tissue was filled with collagen that is a stiff, fibrous material.

In majority of the mammals, including turtles and birds, when the anatomists want to check how the penis becomes erect, they inflate the vascular region of the penis with salt water, but when the same was tried with alligators they noticed no change in the length.

Based on this observation, Kelly concludes that the vascular space inside the alligator's penis was filled with collagen that is stiff enough to inflate.

What still remains a mystery is whether the penis bursts out only during copulation or other times. But the anatomists believe this takes place during mating.

The details of the study were published in the journal Anatomical Record.