Alberta researcher says dinosaur pair could be lovebirds
They were dubbed Romeo and Juliet, a pair of dinosaurs buried side by side beneath a collapsed sand dune in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert more than 75 million years ago.
A University of Alberta academic now suggests the raptors may have indeed been mates, as research shows the tails of each animal have characteristics suggestive of romance.
“Romeo is the peacock and Juliet is the peahen,” said dinosaur paleontologist Scott Persons, a PhD candidate at the university. “When you look closely at their tails, you can see that Romeo has got tail bones that are much wider and have a special shape to them that would facilitate big muscle attachment, which would suggest that Romeo was a better tail dancer than Juliet.”
Research into the mating habitats of dinosaurs is a challenging field. Soft anatomy seldom fossilizes, meaning a dinosaur fossil usually provides no direct evidence as to whether the animal was a male or a female. Paleontologists can determine the sex of most mammals because female hips are wider to facilitate birth. Dinosaurs laid eggs. But dinosaurs likely had elaborate courtship rituals, in the same vein of their modern- day descendants, birds.
“We tend to think of dinosaurs as being in predator- prey relationships and that’s often as far as we go with their behaviour. But dinosaurs were lovers as well as fighters. So it’s neat to think about what dinosaur romance would have been like,” Persons said.
Persons’ team conducted previous research that found a group of dinosaurs called oviraptors had tails that were modified to flaunt and to dance, with a fan of feathers at the very tip. The team predicted that if they found the right specimens, they would find the tails to be sexually dimorphic, meaning the males and female tails would have specific characteristics.
Persons found the perfect specimens when he stumbled on “Romeo and Juliet” in the basement of the American Museum of Natural History. He started to study the remains of the two oviraptors, which had been discovered long ago in the Gobi Desert.
“We discovered that, although both oviraptors were roughly the same size, the same age, and otherwise identical in all anatomical regards, Romeo had larger and specially shaped tail bones,” said Persons. “This indicates it had a greater capacity for courtship displays and was likely a male.”
Oviraptors are a group of dinosaurs that had beaks and feathers. They wandered the lands of what are now China, Mongolia and Alberta.
“Our research shows that for at least one species of oviraptor, their tails were sexually dimorphic and given that we see all of these other adaptations for feathered fans and things throughout ( the species) ... it implies sexual dimorphism was widespread in the group.”
The research was published this week in the journal Scientific Reports.