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I’m missing a bone. You are, too, although which bone that is depends on your anatomical sex. For me and male readers of this post, it’s the baculum – the enigmatic “penis bone” found in the members of many mammals and not us. There is nothing bony about a human boner. But, through the winding path of evolution, female readers are lacking their own genital ossification that’s just as mysterious and has been rarely discussed – the os clitoridis.
The os penis and os clitoridis are osteological correlates of each other. They are the same bone, but in different form in each sex. And while the os clitoridis – sometimes called by the more elegant-sounding name “baubellum” – isn’t a feature of all mammal lineages, the bone has been found in a variety of species among distantly-related beasts. In a 1954 paper in which he lamented that the peculiar bone has “been only sporadically studied”, zoologist James Layne documented that the os clitoridis has been found in a variety of rodents, carnivorans, and primates – marmots, seals, cats, bats, bears,...
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