Becklespinax altispinax
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Becklespinax Temporal range: Early Cretaceous, 133 Ma |
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| Holotype (NHMUK R1828) illustrated c. 1850s | |
| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Reptilia |
| Clade: | Dinosauria |
| Order: | Saurischia |
| Suborder: | Theropoda |
| Clade: | Avetheropoda |
| Clade: | †Carnosauria |
| Genus: |
†Becklespinax Olshevsky, 1991 |
| Species: | †B. altispinax |
| Binomial name | |
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Becklespinax altispinax (Paul, 1988) [originally Acrocanthosaurus] |
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| Synonyms | |
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Becklespinax is a genus of large predatory theropod dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of England.
Probably during the early 1850s, fossil collector Samuel Husbands Beckles discovered some nodules with dinosaur bones in a quarry near Battle, East Sussex. These he sent to palaeontologist Richard Owen, who reported them in 1856. Owen had a lithography made by Joseph Dinkel of the main specimen, a series of three back vertebrae with very tall spines, whose image was also shown in an 1884 edition of an 1855 volume of his standard work on British fossil reptiles, leading to the misunderstanding the fossils had been recovered close to 1884. Owen, who referred the specimens to Megalosaurus bucklandii, thought the vertebrae were part of the shoulder region and it has been assumed that he must have already known of the find in 1853 as he directed Benjamin Waterhouse Hawkins to put a hump on the back of his life-sized Megalosaurus sculpture in Crystal Palace Park, which again inspired other restorations from the 19th century.
The fossil, now catalogued as NHMUK R1828, was found in the Wadhurst Clay Formation of the Hastings Bed Group dating from the late Valanginian age. It consists of a series of three posterior dorsal vertebrae. Owen also reported the presence in the nodules of two right ribs and two additional series of two dorsal vertebral centra each. Olshevsky thought the holotype represented the eighth, ninth, and tenth dorsal vertebra; later researchers, however, have assumed them to be the tenth, eleventh and twelfth.
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