Look at me, I'm really scary

Lizards use press-ups to attract attention

source: New Scientist vol 200 no 2685 November 29 2008 p27

Harvard University's Terry Ord used a robotic lizard placed in a Puerto Rican forest, to understand why lizards do press-ups before making threat displays. The robotic lizard carried out threat displays both with and without the preliminary press-ups. The local lizards took little notice of the threats unless the robot had first carried out the preliminaries. This was especially true when there was little light, so press-ups appear to be a way of attracting attention.