Os clitoridis
bone in the clitoris
The os clitoridis (also called the os clitoris, clitoral bone or baubellum; pl.: baubella) is a bone inside the clitoris of many placental mammals. It is absent from the human clitoris, but present in the clitoris of some primates, such as ring-tailed lemurs and non-human great apes. However, in the latter case, the bone is greatly reduced in size. It is homologous to the baculum in male mammals.
The structure is more evolutionarily labile than the baculum, exhibiting both more inherent variability and more gains and losses over time, which has been interpreted as evidence for its non-functionality.
Other work posits that the variation in the os clitoridis could be driven by intersexual conflict, lock-and-key genital evolution, and cryptic female choice, especially given the high level of variation within species as well as between them.
History
The os clitoridis was described in 1666 by Claude Perrault in otters and in the lioness.
The term os clitoridis was used in 1819 by Friedrich Sigismund Leuckart regarding the capuchin monkey.
This bone was named baubellum by Guy Chester Shortridge in 1934, but it is much less common in comparison to the use of the word baculum. The Latin terms os clitoris and os clitoridis are most often found in scientific publications.
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This entry incorporates text from “Os clitoridis” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.