Concavenator corcovatus found in Spain shows signs of flight feather appendages
Meet the humpback dinosaur. The previously unknown Concavenator corcovatus was a meat eater that lived in the Lower Cretaceous 130m years ago and died in what is now in Las Hoyas, Spain.
The details of the fossil, reported today in Nature, paint a picture of a six-metre-long theropod, a family of dinosaurs previously thought to be confined to southern continents.
Most interesting for the scientists who found the fossil, Francisco Ortega and Jose Sanz of the Universidad Nacional de Educacíon a Distancia in Madrid, is a hump-like structure on the dinosaur's back and a series of small knobs on the forearm. The bumps could be analagous to the parts of modern birds' skeletons that anchor the flight feathers. Since the knobs are unlikely to be representative of feathers on Concavenator, the researchers propose instead that they are "non-scale skin appendages", such as tubular filaments, present in modern-day poultry.