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Hunchbacked dino strengthens bird link

Hypothetical reconstruction of the Flesh-eating dinosaur Concavenator

The remains of this large carnivorous dinosaur reveals evidence for some of the world's first feathers (Source: Raul Martin)


The discovery appears today in the journal Nature.

The dinosaur, Concavenator corcovatus, also known as "the hunchbacked hunter from Cuenca," lived 130 million years ago in what is now Cuenca, Spain.

Close to 6 metres long, the dinosaur was related to Carcharodontosaurus, an enormous predatory dinosaur that was possibly even longer than Tyrannosaurus rex.

The new dino's 'bizarre' hunchback look is a first for dinosaurs.


Ancestral feathers

Ortega, a researcher in the Biology Group at the National University for Distance Education in Madrid, says that the new dinosaur "holds another surprise."

Like many modern birds, the dinosaur possessed "quill knobs," or small bumps on the forearms that generally hold feathers.

"This feature was also recognised in some small dinosaurs, very closely related to birds, such as Velociraptor," he says.


This likely means the large Spanish dinosaur either had feathers, or some type of skin structure that was "an ancestral stage of the feathers in birds," according to Ortega.

He and colleagues Fernando Escaso and Jose Sanz made the determinations after studying the dinosaur's fossils, which represent the most complete carcharodontosaur and the first to show any evidence related to feathers.


In this case, since the feathers appear to have just been on the dinosaur's forearms, the evidence "points to a display function," says Ortega, who adds that they could have also served some as of yet unknown purpose too.


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At first, palaeontologists thought that carcharodontosaurs were limited to the southern continents, since most such fossils were found in places like South America, Africa and Australia.

But this latest discovery and some other recent finds indicate that the dinosaur group was well established in Europe and the northern continents - then Laurasia - too.


"This is a very important paper because it provides evidence that feathers were far more widespread among theropod dinosaurs - the predecessors of birds - than we previously thought," says Luis Chiappe, director of The Dinosaur Institute at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County, told Discovery News.

"It also shows that feathers were not restricted to just small dinosaurs, even if they didn't have to cover their entire bodies," Chiappe adds. "This fossil offers additional support documenting the dinosaurian ancestry of birds and the claim that birds are living dinosaurs."

Tags: dinosaurs, fossils, palaeontology, birds