You’ve probably seen a snake’s forked tongue, but it’s not the slithering animal’s only forked body part. Male snakes sport forked genitals called hemipenes that look a bit like pink cactuses and often have spines to match.
What’s good enough for him is good enough for her in the suborder Serpentes. In a paper published Wednesday in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, scientists provide the first proper scientific description of the hemiclitores, or a bifurcated clitoris in female snakes. The study also challenges a longstanding bias in biology — linked to cultural attitudes and a dearth of women in the field — that has left female sexual anatomy woefully understudied in many species.
Not only do snakes have hemiclitores, the study’s authors report, but the organs also contain nerves and erectile tissue, suggesting they serve a reproductive function and are not merely vestigial.
If subsequent research confirms the presence of a functional clitoris, it could challenge the assumption that snake sex is coercive.