Finally in 3-D: A Dinosaurâs All-Purpose Orifice This cloaca is more than 100 million years old, and it did a lot of work for this extinct species. A reconstruction of Psittacosaurus showing how the cloacal vent might have been used for signaling during courtship.Credit...Bob Nicholls/Paleocreations.com 2020 Jan. 19, 2021 The worldâs oldest known all-purpose orifice sits in a fossil display case in the Senckenberg Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, Germany, so close to the glass that enshrines it that you can âput your face up to it, like this,â said Jakob Vinther, a paleontologist at the University of Bristol in England, holding his hand a couple inches from his nose.