Concavenator
| Concavenator | ||||||||||||
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Concavenator versus a six-foot tall human |
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| Temporal occurrence | ||||||||||||
| Lower Cretaceous ( Barremium ) | ||||||||||||
| 130.7 to 126.3 million years | ||||||||||||
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| Scientific name | ||||||||||||
| Concavenator | ||||||||||||
| Ortega , Escaso & Sanz , 2010 | ||||||||||||
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Concavenator ("Hunters from Cuenca") is a genus of theropod dinosaur from the Lower Cretaceous of Europe. The relatively well-preserved fossils were discovered near the Spanish city of Cuenca by the paleontologists Francisco Ortega , José Luis Sanz and Fernando Escaso .
The approximately six meters long and, like all theropods, bipedal (two-legged) concavenator , had some unique features among the dinosaurs . On his back he carried two "humps" whose function is not clear. The front hump was about four times as high as the rear. Possibly it is a question of sexual dimorphism : accordingly only the males had these conspicuous structures in order to attract females during courtship . Other theropods, such as Spinosaurus , also had large spinous processes on the vertebrae, but they are interpreted differently there. On the ulna , a forearm bone, there are several elevations that are explained as attachment points for hair-like proto - feathers .
Systematics
C. corcovatus is the only known species in this genus. The carnivore is interpreted as a basal (original) Carcharodontosaurier within the Allosauroidea . The systematic position is illustrated by the following cladogram :
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| Carcharodontosauridae |
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Fossils
Location of the fossil in 2002 before the excavation work began
From left to right : Fernando Escaso, Francisco Ortega and José Luis Sanz on the skeleton
literature
- Francisco Ortega, Fernando Escaso, José L. Sanz: A bizarre, humped Carcharodontosauria (Theropoda) from the Lower Cretaceous of Spain. In: Nature . Vol. 467, No. 7312, 2010, pp. 203-206, doi : 10.1038 / nature09181 .