Give yourself a moment to ponder just how bizarre intimate sex through copulation

Give yourself a moment to ponder just how bizarre intimate sex through copulation is: one individual inserts a part of its anatomy into a delicate part of another individual. In The Dawn of the Deed, paleoarcheologist John Long encourages the reader to examine the oddity of sexual intercourse. He depicts this peculiarity by illustrating that somewhere along the phylogenetic tree, a male of some archaic species physically penetrated his female counterpart. What a strange occurrence that must have been! Inspired by his discovery of the oldest-known fossil demonstrating internal fertilization, Materpiscis attenboroughi (a placoderm fish dated to be 540 million years old), Long takes the reader on a journey through the evolution of sexual reproduction. He uses the discovery of the embryo found within Masterpiscis attenboroughi as a starting point for a detailed account of the sexual anatomy and behavior of fish, amphibians, reptiles, birds, mammals, primates and, eventually, humans. Using a combination of evidence found in living species as well as clues preserved in the fossil record, Long provides a thorough account of how and why sexual reproduction might have evolved the way that it did. Complimenting this detailed history of sexual reproduction is Ogas and Gaddam's A Billion Wicked Thoughts. The authors ingeniously use the internet as a digital fossil record to track the footprints of human desire. Drawing their information from millions of individual searches tracked and collected from search engine databases, the authors present unique evidence of the most common—and some of the stranger—sexual desires and preferences. Using this archival information as an unintended survey on human sexuality, Ogas and Gaddam entertain the reader with statistics derived from these searches, in conjunction with personal anecdotes. Using this creative and unique approach, Ogas and