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Around 100 million years ago, male dinosaurs entered a "mating arena" in Colorado and danced their hearts out to attract females, a new study suggests.

Researchers uncovered a series of mating display scrapes preserved on the surface of rocks at Dinosaur Ridge in Jefferson County, Colorado. The state is known for dinosaur track sites, with previous studies suggesting that dinosaurs returned to these mating spots over successive breeding seasons.

The latest marks identified at Dinosaur Ridge suggest that multiple individuals participated in mating display behavior there during the Cretaceous period (145 million to 66 million years ago) and allow the ridge to be classed as a "display arena," or lek, according to the new study, published online on June 4 in the journal Cretaceous Research.

The scapes were left by theropods, a group of bipedal dinosaurs that included Tyrannosaurus rex. Study lead author Caldwell Buntin, a lecturer in Earth science at Old Dominion University in Virginia, told Live Science that they don't have any direct evidence of what species left the marks, but it was a small therapod, around the size of a modern-day ostrich.

Researchers believe that the dinosaurs showed off to potential mates by jabbing their claws deep into the sand, dragging their feet and kicking up sand behind them. Buntin noted that the animals would alternate between their two feet when kicking up sand and had different moves.

"We can tell they had two moves so far, one walking backwards and one moving side to side," Buntin said in an email. "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 3 or more times a few of these show a counter-clockwise turn, kind of like the moonwalk with a little spin."

 

Human-made global heating caused two in every three heat deaths in Europe during this year’s scorching summer, an early analysis of mortality in 854 big cities has found.

Epidemiologists and climate scientists attributed 16,500 out of 24,400 heat deaths from June to August to the extra hot weather brought on by greenhouse gases.

The rapid analysis, which relies on established methods but has not yet been submitted for peer review, found climate breakdown made the cities 2.2C hotter on average, greatly increasing the death toll from dangerously warm weather.

“The causal chain from fossil fuel burning to rising heat and increased mortality is undeniable,” said Friederike Otto, a climate scientist at Imperial College London and a co-author of the report. “If we had not continued to burn fossil fuels over the last decades, most of the estimated 24,400 people in Europe wouldn’t have died this summer.”

 
 
 
 
 
 

“Upon arrival, many new elephants, still plagued by paranoia and lack of trust, take weeks before they will lie down,” the rescue wrote. “However, Grandma Somboon defied the norm. Exhausted from her journey and a lifetime of hardship, she promptly sought the sand pile prepared for her, sleeping soundly amidst the bustling activities around her.”

Somboon spent her whole life standing, and when she finally arrived somewhere she knew she was loved, she was so excited to finally get off her feet and have a rest.

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