The shark-toothed dinosaur with a ‘fin’ on its back

ByEd Yong
September 08, 2010
3 min read

Dinosaur bodies are covered in all sorts of spikes, horns, plates that were used for defence, combat and identification. But sometimes, these body parts are so bizarre that their purpose is a mystery.  The latest in these strange projections belongs to Concavenator, a new giant predator with two spikes sticking up from the vertebrae just in front of its hips. They would probably have given the dinosaur a strange hump on its back.

The most obvious ones are the bizarre spikes on its hips. Back when the animal was flesh as well as bone, these spikes would have formed a kind of hump. “The most plausible role for this structure is that of a deposit of fat,” says Ortega. It might be like the hump of modern animals like zebu cattle, but these humps have no internal bony supports. Alternatively, a structure that striking could allow individuals to communicate with one another. The spikes could also have supported a fold of skin that helped Concavenator to keep cool. “For the moment, we can consider that all these options are reasonable interpretations, but they still remain in the realm of speculation,” says Ortega, who has no favourites among the three hypotheses.

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