A particle system, child of an animated transform, does not rotate when new rotations are applied to parent during LateUpdate.

The issue I'm seeing is in an animated fire-breathing dragon I've made out of unity geometry.

I have the dragon's head's rotation animating, bobbing. When I need him to look, I hijack his head transform in LateUpdate and make him LookAt a target. While other cubes that make up his jaw and eyes rotate correctly with their parent's transform (the head), the fire particle system that I have on the same level does not rotate. I can see in the editor that it 'thinks' the particles system is rotating, but the particles continue to shoot straight out as shown in Figure 1.

Figure 1. Showing hierarchy and particle direction discrepancy.

If I remove the all the head's rotation keyframes, or disable the animator component on the dragon. The particles rotate correctly and shoot out the correct rotated direction.

What I find strange is that the particle system isn't being animated directly and that it only gets 'stuck' when its parent is animated.

One last thing, FireParent shown in Figure 1 is just an identity transform and doesn't change it's child. It's pointing the same direction as FireParticles.

Any insight into why the particles system is behaving this way would be great, as well as how to fix it without removing the head's keyframes permanently.

Thanks!

Edit: Grammer.