Tiny dinos with fancy neck frills were big showoffs
By Stephanie Pappas - Live Science Contributor 5 hours ago
Frills probably helped dinosaurs establish dominance or find mates.
An artist's rendition of a Protoceratops with a colorful neck frill.
(Image: © CC-BY-SA 4.0)
Adorable sheep-sized dinosaurs probably evolved their fancy neck frills to attract mates or show off their dominance.
Protoceratops a dinosaur that looked a bit like a mini-Triceratops without horns had elaborate and varied neck frills. Paleontologists have debated what they were used for: Defense? Temperature regulation? Or perhaps, like modern birds with colorful tail feathers, the dinosaurs evolved the frills to show off their fitness to potential mates and competitors, a process of sexual selection. In sexual selection, an animal with a certain trait that appeals to potential mates or otherwise allows them to reproduce more will get passed down to the next generation and become more common.
It's hard to prove sexual selection directly, because it's impossible to know if a dinosaur with a bigger, brighter frill actually had more success with mating and producing offspring. But researchers at The Natural History Museum London and Queen Mary University London turned to clues about the growth and variation of the frills to see if they matched the patterns of sexually selected traits in animals seen today.
The researchers stitched together dozens to hundreds of photographs of 65 skulls from Protoceratops species, using software to create 3D models of the skulls. Of these, 30 were complete digital reconstructions. The skulls came from dinosaurs ranging from a day old to full adulthood, so the scientists could compare growth rates of the frills with that of other parts of the skull.
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