DinoFrontier
About Compsognathus
Compsognathus was a small, lightly built meat-eating dinosaur, about the size of a turkey. It lived on the islands of a warm, shallow sea that covered much of Europe in the Late Jurassic, the same lagoons where Archaeopteryx is found.
It had a long neck and tail, long slender legs built for running and short arms with two main clawed fingers. Its small, sharp teeth were suited to catching small, fast prey.
For over a century Compsognathus was one of the smallest dinosaurs known, and it was among the first dinosaur fossils found with a nearly complete skeleton.
Compsognathus facts
- The German specimen has a whole lizard, Bavarisaurus, preserved inside its ribcage: its last meal.
- Compsognathus helped Thomas Henry Huxley argue in the 1860s that birds are closely related to dinosaurs.
- Only two good skeletons are known, one from Germany and a larger one from France.
- Jurassic Park's "compys" made it famous, though the film shows it hunting in swarms, which there is no fossil evidence for.
Discovery
The first skeleton was found in the Solnhofen limestone of Bavaria in the 1850s and acquired by the physician and collector Joseph Oberndorfer. Johann Andreas Wagner named it in 1859. A second, larger skeleton was found near Canjuers in France in the early 1970s.
