Fri October 26, 2012 Hey, Sexy Dino, Show Me Your Feathers
Originally published on Fri October 26, 2012 7:43 pm Some of the
weirdest animal behavior is about romance. That's especially
true with birds — they croon or dance or display brilliant
feathers to seduce the reluctant. This sort of sexual display
apparently has a long pedigree: There's now new evidence that
some dinosaurs may have used the same come-on. The source is a
kind of dinosaur that was built like a 400-pound ostrich. It
lived about 75 million years ago and is called ornithomimus,
meaning "bird mimic." Scientists in Canada found the fossilized
bones of one in 1995 that looked different from what they'd seen
before. It had mysterious markings on the forearms. Two more
were found recently with even more pronounced markings. When
paleontologist Darla Zelenitsky took a close look at them, she
was surprised. "We were finding these winglike structures in
these relatively primitive dinosaurs," she says. The markings
were the remains of primitive feat