The hunchback of central Spain
New dinosaur species has a hump plus possible featherlike structures on its arms
A newly described carnivorous dinosaur species has a strikingly unusual hump on its back and hints of featherlike appendages on its arms. The 125 million-year-old fossil from central Spain suggests that feathers evolved in more primitive dinosaurs than previously thought, researchers say.
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Scientists found the nearly complete skeleton of Concavenator corcovatus, which means “the hunchback hunter from Cuenca,” at a fossil site called Las Hoyas, in Cuenca, Spain, in 2003. The fossil was exquisitely preserved in the dense limestone, which had impressions of the dino’s scales. After seven years of painstaking removal, vertebrate paleontologist Francisco Ortega of the Universidad Nacional de Educación a Distancia in Madrid and his colleagues have published the first description of the animal in the Sept. 9 Nature.
Concavenator belongs to a family of dinosaurs known as Carcharodontosauria. These carnivores walked on hind legs, had three main fingers at the end of each stubby arm and ripped through flesh with razorlike teeth.