Scientists have discovered that a fossil site in Colorado was once the equivalent of a popular nightclub back in the long-ago Cretaceous era.
In those times, male dinosaurs, some similar to the Tyrannosaurus rex, traveled to this once long-ago plain of tidal mud to preen and bust dance moves — even doing what the researchers described as a prehistoric moonwalk a la Michael Jackson— in hopes of catching the eyes of obliging females at the scene, according to a new study in the journal Cretaceous Research.
The researchers discovered these courtship dances by closely examining 35 dino tracks preserved into stone at Colorado’s Dinosaur Ridge, an outdoor paleontology museum where the first Stegosaurus skeleton was found.
Scrapes, gouges and other marks from stomping feet and claws on the preserved rock reveal that dinosaurs would move in particular ways: zipping backwards or side-to-side, with dug-in marks suggesting the creatures would dig their claws into the ground and then kick dirt behind them.
“We can tell they had two moves so far, one walking backwards and one moving side to side,” Caldwell Buntin, a paleontologist at Old Dominion University in Virginia and the paper’s first author, told Live Science. “If they were really excited they would step a few feet backwards and repeat the motion, which usually erases the back half of each earlier set of scrapes. When this happened three or more times a few of these show a counter-clockwise turn, kind of like the moonwalk with a little spin.”
Scientists have two candidates on who made those track marks: ornithomimids, which were biped dinosaurs that resemble an ostrich or emu when befeathered, and the acrocanthosaurus, which looks like a T. Rex but smaller.
Another intriguing feature of the site is that evidence there strongly points towards the theory that dinosaurs visited this site over and over again at different times, suggesting that this once long-ago stretch of tidal mud was a major place for courtship and mating.
In animal behavior parlance, a place for mating is called a lek, which can also refer to how groups of horny male animals strut and display in front of eligible females. (You’ve probably seen videos of birds, which are the modern-day descendants of dinosaurs, engaging in similar theatrics.)
The researchers of the dinosaur study also call the Colorado location a lek. There are three known dinosaur lek sites in the world, according to Science, in addition to Dinosaur Ridge, which makes the ancient sites staggeringly rare.
What’s apt is that a lek is commonly used in the context of our avian friends, and modern birds are essentially living dinosaurs.
So next time you see a peacock or a rooster unfurling and waving its tail feathers and how they scratch at the ground with their claws, you may be getting a glimpse on how dinosaurs loved and courted a long time ago. Good thing they’re so small.
More on dinosaurs: A Dinosaur Appears to Have Died on the Exact Spot They Later Built a Dinosaur Museum, Burying Its Fossil Underneath It