Offering a rare sneak peek into the courtship behavior of dinosaurs, an international team of scientists has claimed that the giant extinct animals would shake a tail feather and use fancy footwork to attract their mates.

The findings, based on millions of years old fossils found in the rocks of Colorado, have been published in Scientific. The fossils provide physical proof that some dinosaurs may have acted much like birds, their modern-day relatives. An asteroid that smashed into the Earth some 66 million years ago led to the complete wipeout of the dinosaurs. This typical form of mating is called "scraping”, which is more common among modern ground-nesting birds.

Besides courtship behavior, the fossils, particularly bones, help scientists study how these animals looked like, what they chose for food, how they moved around and whether they fought or not. The trackways of the giant animals found in British Columbia, Canada, have even shown that these animals may have killed their prey in groups.

“Despite extensive phylogenetic and morphological support, behavioral evidence is mostly ambiguous and does not usually fossilize”, wrote Martin Lockley of the University of Colorado, Denver, and his co-authors.

Lockley concluded that inferences that dinosaurs, especially theropods, displayed behavior analogous to modern birds are intriguing, but speculative.

The scientists studied tracks found in the Dakota Sandstone of Colorado, three locations in the western part of the state and another one in the eastern part. Through this evidence, the researchers joined the pieces to sketch out what that mating process may have been like.

The biggest of the sites, the scientists said, had about 60 scrapes on one sandstone surface that was roughly 50 meters long and 15 meters wide. Such sites may have served as leks, or display arenas, where males might gather in large groups to show off to the ladies, they said.