Talk:Godzilla Misconceptions/@comment-24572700-20140421172222/@comment-24572700-20140627032050

I was more reffering to "spines" in a biological sense, since a spine is something like what you find on an echidna or hedgehog; they're usually made of keratin, rather than bone. A scute is a bony structure on the animal's hide, like a crocodile's.

In-canon, people call them spines, but since skeletals in both the Heisei and some of the Millenium continuities show them, it's safe to assume that they're probably scutes, as keratin generally doesn't handle decay all too well (hence why we only have the bony cores of a skeleton's claws, not the full thing with the keratin sheath).

Since Godzilla is usually claded as a ceratosaur by palaeontologists (which makes biologic sense, though this may not apply in-canon), the logical conclusion is that they are dorsal scutes, since that's the most parsimonious option given the data available (they're bony, shown as such in all available skeletals, aren't decayed with flesh under normal circumstances and all of his likely relatives possess them).

But again, all this may not apply in canon.