Long before women were shaking their booty on the dance floor, dinosaurs were shakin’ it for attention. Researchers now believe some feathered dinosaurs shook their tail feathers to attract a mate.
The proof is in the fossils
Scientists studied the tailbones of two-legged, feathery dinosaurs called oviraptors.
“Their tails were not only very, very flexible, but quite muscular,” researcher Scott Persons, a vertebrate paleontologist at the University of Alberta in Canada, told LiveScience. “They could not only move them sinuously to strike a pose, but also hold it to do a muscular dance with the tail.”
Previous research shows these small dinosaurs had a bone crest on their head, which would also grab a mate’s attention.
“I think like peacocks, oviraptors were strutting their stuff by shaking their tail feathers to show off,” Persons said. “Between the crested head and feathered-tail shaking, oviraptors had a propensity for visual exhibitionism.”
More research needed
Persons wants to continue his research. He wonders if the bone structure differs between male and females.
“Maybe they were larger in males, as we see in modern-day birds,” Persons said. “The problem there is that the tip of the tail is one of the rarest parts of a fossil skeleton to find, so it might be hard to discover evidence of these sexual differences.”
Another recent discovery in the dino world
Paleontologists have unearthed a rare species of dinosaur; one with a beak like a parrot and a body the size of a small dog.
The ‘Pegomastax’ was lodged in a rock that Paul C. Sereno, a paleontologist at the University of Chicago and a dinosaur specialist, dug up almost 30 years ago.
With a strong jaw, self-sharpening teeth and spikes like a porcupine, paleontologists believe it was built as a “nimble two-legged porcupine.”
Read more about this discovery here.
