We’ve all got that image in our heads; dinosaurs as these massive, unstoppable, roaring beasts. But what if I told you some of them danced?
Not metaphorically. They literally danced, scraped the ground, spun in place, performed, and all in the name of love.
At Dinosaur Ridge in Colorado, scientists have found something wild: a kind of prehistoric stage. Not filled with bones—though the area is famous for those too—but covered in strange marks in the rock: swirls, zigzags, claw scrapes. Over and over again, and in the same places. It’s like someone left behind a fossilized routine.
And they did. About 100 million years ago, during the Cretaceous period, small theropods—similar to Tyrannosaurus rex, just way smaller—were showing off. They weren’t hunting or fleeing. They were flirting.
Researchers think it was lekking behavior, the same thing you see today in animals like grouse or birds-of-paradise. The males gather in one spot. They dance, display, and compete. The females? They watch. And then choose.
Thanks to drones, 3D scanning, and sediment studies, a team led by paleontologist Kevin Church captured the details: dozens of carefully placed, overlapping marks in a flat stretch of ancient earth. These weren’t just random scratches. They were part of something more familiar than we ever expected: animal courtship written in stone.
The flirting game, dinosaur-style
Picture this: a few small theropods, maybe about three feet tall, each one dragging his claws across the ground in wide loops. Some twist in place. Others double back over their own tracks. All of them are moving with purpose—repeating steps, showing off energy and control.
No one’s fighting. No one’s running. This is about attention, about style and sexual selection, millions of years before peacocks and prom poses.
It’s the same strategy birds use today. Grouse clear little dance floors in the grass and stomp around in circles. Birds-of-paradise take it to a whole other level with color, rhythm, and flair. And now we know? Dinosaurs did it too.
These scratches say more than bones ever could
Most fossil discoveries are about what dinosaurs looked like—their size, their teeth, how they moved. But this? This tells us something about who they were.
Some of the grooves are deep. Some are shallow. Some overlap perfectly. These dinosaurs came back to the same spots, doing the same moves, again and again. Researchers used 3D scans and overhead views from drones to map out the patterns. It’s like reconstructing a dance, and one that no human ever saw, but the ground remembers.
That’s what makes it so special. In paleontology, it’s rare to find behavior preserved like this. But here, you don’t just see how dinosaurs walked — you see why they moved.
This is paleobehavior. And it’s weirdly beautiful.
Still don’t believe it? You can go see it
Here’s the part that’s hard to believe: you can visit it. You can go stand on this ancient dance floor.
Dinosaur Ridge, in the United States, is open to the public. You can literally walk where dinosaurs once danced for love. You can see the scrapes they made, marks they left behind during one of the most vulnerable, instinct-driven moments of their lives.
And thanks to resources like Wikimedia, you don’t even have to go there to learn about it. The whole world can access the site’s history; teachers, kids, dino nerds, you name it.
It’s a reminder that dinosaurs weren’t just monsters or museum skeletons. They were animals. With social lives. With competition. With show-offs. Some of them were loud. Some were graceful. And some… knew how to put on a show.