Alligators have permanent erection hidden inside their own cloacas

The video below is strange and unusual. When dissecting an alligator, Brandon Moore of Louisiana Tech University touches the specimen's pelvic nerve and suddenly has a surprise: the animal's penis expels quickly, even scaring the researcher. Ten centimeters long and very white, the alligator's sex organ is one of the strangest in the animal world.

In an interview with National Geographic, University of Massachusetts scientist Diane Kelly explains that the alligators' penis is hidden inside their cloacas, the hole through which they expel both their feces and urine. In addition, the sex organ is made entirely of collagen and does not receive blood to be erected: it is permanently erect.

But no one is sure how the alligator "shows the snake." The most obvious idea would be with the help of muscles present in that region, but this is not possible since there are no muscles attached to the animal's penis. It is as if the organ is almost floating loosely inside the alligator. But thanks to Moore's video, Kelly was able to think of a hypothesis to solve the issue.

What happens is that there is a kind of tendon attached to the middle of the penis, the base of which is connected to the hip bone through a pair of ligaments consistent as a money elastic. When the penis is out, these ligaments are stretched. As soon as the cloaca relaxes, these "elastics" pull the penis inward.

However, everything is just a hypothesis. To be sure that this is working correctly, Kelly, who specializes in animal penises, still needs to perform experiments with alligator muscles, tendons and ligaments, and analyze the behavior of live specimens.