About 100 million years ago, 23 kilometers west of what is today Denver, large groups of male Tyrannosaurus rex–like dinosaurs gathered to dance, twisting and kicking in what may have been one of the most elaborate mating rituals in the ancient world. That’s one possible explanation of an unusual find made at Colorado’s famed Dinosaur Ridge and reported over the weekend in Cretaceous Research.
Although a few of these dinosaur “lekking” spots may have been found before, “this site at Dinosaur Ridge indicates that this wasn’t just a behavior found in a specific spot or just a one-off thing,” says Erin LaCount, director of education programs at Dinosaur Ridge who was not involved with the study. “To go from two to potentially three lek traces to having more than 30 in this study could make our site the largest lekking arena in the world.”
Dinosaur Ridge first gained notoriety for its role in the Bone Wars—a series of increasingly hostile excavations between two paleontologists, Edward Drinker Cope and Othniel Charles Marsh, in the late 19th century. Here, these researchers unearthed some of the most iconic dinosaur fossils, including the first Stegosaurus…