Once you're pregnant, predictions about whether you're carrying a boy or girl will abound based on everything from your cravings to the the shape of your bump… yet a new study suggests that lemurs have a far simpler method to determine an unborn baby's gender: by smell.
Lemurs, in case you've never smelled one (and you're better off not), emit a musky stench from their genitals that's already been shown to clearly advertise their sex, fertility, and other noteworthy attributes. But this is the first research to show that a whiff from their bottom also gives away their unborn baby's gender.
To come to these groundbreaking conclusions, researchers at Duke University collected cotton swabs of 12 female lemurs' genital secretions and analyzed their components. They found that this heady aroma changes dramatically based on whether the lemur is pregnant with a boy or a girl — and that lemurs are able to easily detect this difference.
More from The Stir: 6 Ways to Tell Baby's Gender From an Early Sonogram
Wouldn't it be nice if our own sense of smell were equally capable of predicting a baby's gender? That, instead of waiting months for an ultrasound to get the news of our baby's gender, we'd all know instantly with one whiff?
Or, uh, maybe hearing "I smell you're having a girl! Congratulations!" is a little TMI for most folks…. n either case, you've gotta hand it to lemurs for not needing a high-tech sonogram for the answer.
Have you heard of any strange ways to predict an unborn baby's gender?
Image via Alex James Bramwell/shutterstock
