The Alligator Has a Permanently Erect, Bungee Penis [Video]

In the video above, Brandon Moore from Louisiana Tech University is dissecting a freshly dead male alligator. You’re looking at the creature’s underside, near its hip area. As the sequence begins, Moore’s scalpel touches the alligator’s pelvic nerve. The metal makes the nerve fire and…

... the utterly bizarre penis of the American alligator. Here are the highlights: it’s permanently erect; it shoots out like toothpaste from a tube; and it bounces back because it basically has a rubber band attached to it.

Through dissection, she discovered that the alligator’s penis doesn’t inflate at all. It’s permanently erect. The whole structure is filled with dense layers of a stiff protein called collagen. Even the central bit, where blood would normally flow down, is just collagen, collagen and more collagen.

That’s bizarre. Whenever a reptile, bird or mammal has a penis (and some don’t), it always inflates in some way. Maybe blood pumps into it, as in humans, other mammals, and turtles. Maybe it explosively turns inside-out like in ducks and some lizards or snakes. Either way, some shape-changing occurs. But not in alligators...