IS IT a shark with legs? No, it’s a new species of dinosaur with a mysterious fin.
Concavenator corcovatus, which belonged to the theropod group of dinosaurs, has a pair of vertebrae five times longer than the others, which protrude midway along its back to make a triangular fin. “We’ve no idea what it is for,” says Francisco Ortega of the National University of Distance Education in Madrid and head of the team that found the skeleton in Las Hoyas, Spain (Nature, DOI: 10.1038/nature09181).
“The back fin is just plain weird,” says Roger Benson at the University of…
