Nowadays you can find a date with the simple swipe of a screen. But it hasn’t always been so easy to find love.
Think of the poor dinosaurs, for instance, who had to put in a fair amount of legwork (quite literally) to find connection.
In 2016, a paper suggested that some dinos scratched the ground to get their potential mates’ hearts fluttering.
Why would scratching the ground help?
Huge scrapes in the ground, about two metres in diameter, have been found in places like Colorado and Canada.
Researchers say this is reminiscent of some birds’ mating and nesting displays.
Indeed the scrapes ― there were about 50 of them in one American site ― were clustered near what was believed to be a dinosaur nest.
Geologist Martin Lockley of the University of Colorado at Denver told Voice of America: “The animal gets excited in the breeding season. Whether it’s a bird or a dinosaur, it starts scraping to show its mate, ‘I know how to build a nest.’”
He added that “in the excitement, it makes a few scrapes, and that’s enough for that one, and goes on and makes another one and another one”.
That suggests the female dinosaurs of that species had, well, standards, scientists say, and chose the most impressive males they could after the courtship ceremony.
I mean, who’d want to lay eggs with a fella who couldn’t even scrape a nest together?
Another 2010 study found that the plumage (yep, dinosaurs likely had feathers) of some species may have helped them to attract a mate.
Researchers noticed that the female species of some dinosaurs didn’t seem built to hold as many, or as elaborate, feathers as the boys – a pattern we see in flamboyant bird species on the quest for love today.
How else did dinos impress their dates?
Aside from gorgeous feathers and impressive home-building skills, researchers think that a lot of the body parts we associate with dino defence could have been used to secure a date too.
For instance, scientists reckon the horns and plates of triceratops could have been useful for fighting, but also an attractive feature in and of themselves.
The species likely shared equal parenting duties too, experts say.
Dinosaurs with club tails were similarly likely to have evolved the body part to impress their potential mates in sophisticated mating rituals, rather than as a truly helpful predation tool, experts think.
And I can’t even get a text back...