So, What's New with Dinosaurs This Week?

The $10M T-Rex iPad, dinosaurs shaking their tailfeathers, the economic implications of uncovering a fossilized penis, and the father of all crocodiles.

Welcome to the latest instalment of our weekly review of what's been unearthed (ha! Jokes!) in the wide world of dinosaurs. First off, a new analysis of the oviraptor's bone structure suggests that the small dinos from the late cretaceous era likely had the ability to shake their tailfeathers, much like peacocks do today. Scott Parsons, a doctoral student at the University of Alberta, says the oviraptor's unique ability to shake it was likely used to attract mates, a characteristic that was likely passed down into the oviraptor's modern-day descendents – brids. Via PhysOrg:

The tail structure of the Oviraptor is shorter than most other dinosaurs. He discovered that this short size was not because of missing bones but because each individual vertebra are compacted together. This dense arrangement of the bones makes the tails extremely flexible.

Fossil impressions of these birds show that they had a large fan of feathers that were attached to the end of their tails. These feathers were attached by fused vertebrae at the end of the tail. Combined together, this flexible fan of feathers may have been used as a way to attract potential mates, similar to modern-day peacocks.

And speaking of bones, if you've got about $10 million to spare, you can fork it all over for the world's most expensive iPad: a diamond-encrusted, gold-drenched tablet that includes a piece of a Tyrannosaurus Rex's thigh bone. British luxury goods salesman Stuart Hughes says he's already sold one of the iPads, so act quick if you want own quite possibly the most ostentatious piece of electronic equipment ever created.

OR, you can save your pennies and wait until paleontologists inevitably discover a dinosaur penis or vagina. According to one-half of Two Guys Fossils, Inc., a Massachusetts company that sells, well, fossils, "There's never been a fossilized penis or vagina found on a dinosaur ... The first person who finds one is going to make bundles of cash, but who knows how much." The company says the dinosaur fossil market is burgeoning among the one per cent, with a complete triceratops fossil recently selling for 592,000 euros, a fossilized dinosaur brain for $2,000, and in 2007, Nicolas Cage outbid Leonardo DiCaprio for a T-Rex skull that came in at $276,000. Hal Prandi, the owner of Two Guys Fossils, says you can get dino toes for $295 a piece, or the full tail of a camarasaurus for $20,000. But should a T-Rex penis, believed to be a foot wide and 12 feet long, ever be uncovered, Prandi figures "only guys on Wall Street can afford something like that."

And while crocodiles aren't dinosaurs in the strictest sense of the term, paleontologists say they have pinpointed what they believe to be the first ever crocodile, which would have lived alongside dinosaurs some 93 million years ago. The shieldcroc, as it's been termed, would have been a whopping 10 metres long and boasted a heavy-plated skull from which its name is derived. While the remains of a shieldcroc have been held at the Royal Ontario Museum for the last decade, only now has an analysis been performed to determine its relationship to modern day alligators and crocodiles. According to Jennifer Viegas:

Shieldcroc ... is capturing greater interest due to its hard-to-miss "shield," a raised mound of tissue packed with blood vessels and likely covered by a thick sheath, similar to what is seen in the frill of horned dinosaurs. It might have helped to regulate body temperature, but probably served a flashier purpose.

"There is anecdotal evidence that modern horned crocs will raise the back of their heads to show off their horns during courtship and territorial disputes," says Assistant Professor Casey Holliday in the Program in Integrative Anatomy at the University of Missouri. "We think this shield served a similar purpose, as a means to show off."

And that shared trait leads the researchers to conclude that shieldcroc would go on to spawn the aquatic hell beasts known around the world today as alligators and crocodiles.