New insights into the animals intimate encounters include species that cut holes into their partners for sex, squid that swap genders, and males that deploy flesh-burrowing sperm.
Bizarre prehistoric creatures--sea monsters, gargantuan rodents, a redheaded Neanderthal--are among the stars of the most read stories on dinosaurs and fossils by National Geographic News in 2008.
See National Geographic News's most popular individual photos of 2008, including pictures of a giant stingray, a "smiling" sky, a lizard-snake standoff, and more.
A pink, cyanide-squirting millipede and probably the world's biggest spider are among 1,068 new species discovered in a single Asian region in the last ten years.