Surprise! Snakes Have Clitorises

In her two decades as a genital morphologist, Patricia Brennan has looked at a lot of animal clitorises. She’s seen female lizards’ two spike-studded protrusions, which are almost identical to their counterparts on males. She’s glimpsed the prominent appendage through which female spotted hyenas urinate and give birth. She’s even studied the thin-skinned, nerve-laced organ of a female dolphin, which Brennan’s work suggests makes sex pleasurable. But until quite recently, she had never found a clitoris on a snake.

Brennan, to be clear, had checked. A researcher at Mount Holyoke College, she had dissected all sorts of snakes and lizards over the years and always found the same thing: Males sport a pair of heavily ornamented penises, called hemipenes, that can, like the lining of a pocket, be popped out of the base of the tail; the same trick works on