Becklespinax was a large meat-eating theropod dinosaur from the Early Cretaceous of England, living around 135 million years ago. It is known from just three connected back vertebrae, found near Battle in East Sussex in the 1850s by the fossil collector Samuel Husbands Beckles. The neural spines on top of these vertebrae are several times taller than the body of the bone, which means the living animal had a pronounced ridge, hump or low sail along its back.

The bones were first assigned to Megalosaurus, later to a genus called Altispinax, and in 1991 the dinosaur researcher George Olshevsky gave them the new name Becklespinax, meaning “Beckles’ spine”. More recent work has argued that the older name, Altispinax dunkeri, is the correct one for these fossils after all, so in current scientific literature you will often see the animal called Altispinax instead.

With so little to go on, its size and relationships are uncertain. Estimates put it somewhere between five and eight metres long, and it has been compared with allosaurs and other large predators of its time. Any full reconstruction, including a toy, involves a good deal of informed guesswork.