It may have ruffled a few feathers, but it earned him the coveted Ig Nobel prize for biology awarded for improbable research…As he recounts in his seminal paper, The first case of homosexual necrophilia in the mallard anas platyrhynchos, he was in his office in the Natuurmuseum Rotterdam, when he was alerted by a bang to the fact a bird had crashed into the glass facade of the building. “I went downstairs immediately to see if the window was damaged, and saw a drake mallard (anas platyrhynchos) lying motionless on its belly in the sand, two metres outside the facade. The unfortunate duck apparently had hit the building in full flight at a height of about three metres from the ground. Next to the obviously dead duck, another male mallard (in full adult plumage without any visible traces of moult) was present. He forcibly picked into the back, the base of the bill and mostly into the back of the head of the dead mallard for about two minutes, then mounted the corpse and started to copulate, with great force, almost continuously picking the side of the head. Rather startled, I watched this scene from close quarters behind the window until 19.10 hours during which time (75 minutes) I made some photographs and the mallard almost continuously copulated his dead congener.”

And people lambasted Rick Santorum for his slippery slope argument. This article is definitive proof that gay marriage won’t merely stop at polygamy and incest. It will quickly lead to unabated male-duck on dead-male-duck action, as it already has in Amsterdam, a nation that legalized gay marriage in 2001. No word yet as to whether the ducks are taking legal action to receive their dead partners’ universal healthcare coverage.

Nod to Andrew Sullivan for this quacktastic link.