Dinosaurs are getting flashier all the time. Aside from the crests, sails, horns, and other bizarre skeletal structures, beautifully-preserved soft tissues have revealed that many dinosaurs wore colorful coats of fuzz, bristles, and feathers. Dinosaurs such as the fluffy Sinosauropteryx may have shown off their striped tails, the long arm feathers of adult Ornithomimus may have marked sexual maturity, and the iridescent gloss of Microraptor might have made the bird-like dinosaur all the more attractive to potential mates. Now an in-press paper by paleontologists Scott Persons, Philip Currie, and Mark Norell proposes that oviraptorosaurs – feathery, beaked, omnivorous dinosaurs – had flexible tails which would have allowed them to strike a variety of poses.

The new Acta Palaeontologica Polonica study focuses