Sails! Yes, I'm talking about the tall vertebral fins running across the backs of, most famously, Spinosaurus aegypticus and Dimetrodon ssp. These weird structures have driven paleobiologists crazy for years: what were they for? How did they work? What benefit did they impart to the creatures that used them? Two interpretations of Spinosaurus. From the excellent blog Mesozoic Archives. The picture is complicated by the fact that Dimetrodon and Spinosaurus could not have been further apart, taxonomically speaking: Dimetrodon was a synapsid - like mammals - while Spinosaurus and other dinosaurs belonged to the archosaur supergroup, like crocodiles. Their last common ancestor was some kind of primordial lizardy thing, and since then they had nothing to do with each other. They were also separated by 207 million years, which is three times as long as the span separating dinosaurs and us. Source: Wikimedia Taking an even broader view, things get weirder. Just after Di...
A blog about comic books, art, stories, and interesting tidbits.