Washington, Nov 6 (ANI): Oviraptor dinosaurs may have waved their flexible tail feathers, in a way that resembles the habits of a modern-day peacock, to attract potential mates, a new study has suggested.
The dinosaur lived in the late Cretaceous Period, about 75 million years ago and got its name, Latin for "egg thief", because the first specimen was found near a clutch of eggs as if the beast were stealing them, but it was later revealed that the eggs were likely its own.
Scott Persons from the University of Alberta began studying the tails of various species of Oviraptor as part of a larger study on the tails of all theropods, a group of dinosaurs related closely to modern-day birds.
According to him, the dinosaurs have unusually compact, flexible tails, and combined with a fan of feathers attached to the tail's end, this would have enabled Oviraptor to put on a show similar to that of a modern-day peacock.
"The tail of an Oviraptor by comparison to the tail of most other dinosaurs is pretty darn short," Persons said.
"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," he said.
The dense bone arrangement would have made the tails especially flexible, like a person's spine with its many bone junctions can move more sinuously than an arm, which has only a couple of joints.
The study also suggests that oviraptorids had particularly muscular tails, and fossil impressions reveal that they also came equipped with a fan of feathers at the end of their tails, attached to a hunk of fused vertebrae not unlike those found in the tails of modern-day 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.
"If you think about things like peacocks, they often use their tails in courtship displays," he added. (ANI)
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