Setting hearts aflutter: The bird-like dinosaur that acted like a Vegas showgirl to attract mates

From Daily Mail Online: Setting hearts aflutter: The bird-like dinosaur that acted like a Vegas showgirl to attract mates
With just a flirty swish of a feathered fan, Vegas showgirls can quicken any man’s pulse.
But it seems it's a centuries-old trick.

Scientists believe a species of dinosaur may have acted like a showy Vegas diva to attract mates.

Oviraptor dinosaurs had a fan of feathers, similar to the fan of a flamenco dancer, attached to a flexible tail, according to a new study.

They may have flashed these feathers to attract attention in a similar way to the modern-day peacock – or a Vegas showgirl.

Scott Persons, a doctoral student at the University of Alberta, presented the research at the Society for Vertebrate Paleontology's annual meeting.

He found that Oviraptors, which lived about 75 million years ago, had tails with a peculiarly dense arrangement of bones.

‘The tail of an Oviraptor by comparison to the tail of most other dinosaurs is pretty darn short,’ he told LiveScience.

‘But it's not short in that it's missing a whole bunch of vertebrae, it's short in that the individual vertebra within the tail themselves are sort of squashed together. So they're densely packed.’

This dense arrangement of bones would have made the tails flexible, Parsons said.

The bird-like dinosaurs also had tails that were much more muscly than those belonging to modern-day reptiles.

Fossil impressions show they also boasted a fan of feathers at the end of their tails, attached to fused vertebrae similar to that found in the tails of today’s birds.

‘If you combine that with having a muscular, very flexible tail, what you have is a tail that could, potentially at least, have been used to flaunt, to wave that tail-feather fan,’ Persons said.

And just like modern-day birds, the dinosaurs may well have waved their tail fans to impress potential mates.

Persons added: ‘If you think about things like peacocks, they often use their tails in courtship displays.'

Oviraptors lived in the late Cretaceous Period.

Their name is Latin for ‘egg thief’ as the first specimen was found near a pile of eggs as if it had stolen them.
Subsequent discoveries revealed they were likely dinosaur’s own, though scientists are still unsure of whether its diet would have included eggs.