Beauty before flight?

You might think flying is an impressive enough goal for any creature, but the Telegraph reveals new clues that dinosaurs may have evolved wings to attract mates:

Dr Robert Nudds, a biologist at the University of Manchester who carried out the research, said his work had raised the prospect that sexual selection played a bigger role in the evolution of flight than had been previously thought.

He said: “The problem we see is why an animal would start holding its forelimbs out to the side in a symmetrical manner in the first place.

“One theory is that these feathered dinosaurs used their forelimbs in some sort of sexual display, so maybe they ran around with their arms outstretched to show off how pretty their feathers were.”

Yeah. Pretty. So much for prehistoric killing machines and ruling the earth under their thunderous, scaly claws and that.