Compsognathus

Meet the Compsognathus, a small and elegant dinosaur.

Its name comes from Greek words meaning "dainty jaw." This animal was a theropod, which is a group of meat-eating dinosaurs.

It lived about 150 million years ago during the late Jurassic period. At that time, the land where it lived was part of a group of islands in Europe. Scientists believe it was a very active hunter. It is one of the few dinosaurs where we know exactly what it ate.

Inside the bellies of its fossils, scientists found the remains of small, quick lizards.

This dinosaur had a very specific way of moving. It was bipedal, which means it walked on two legs.

It had long legs to help it run. It also had a long tail to help it stay balanced while it moved. Its head was narrow with a long snout. The skull had five pairs of openings, called fenestrae, which helped make the bone lighter.

Its teeth were small and pointy. Most of its teeth had tiny serrations, or saw-like edges, on the back. These helped it grip its food. Its hands were much smaller than its legs. They had two large claws, but a third finger might have been too small to use.

We know about this dinosaur because of two important fossils.

The first was found in Bavaria, Germany, in the 1850s. A man named Joseph Oberndorfer collected this fossil. He later gave it to a scientist named Johann A. Wagner. Wagner named the dinosaur in 1859. He did not think it was a dinosaur at first. He thought it was a curious kind of lizard. Later, the famous scientist Thomas Huxley studied it. He thought it looked like a bird-like reptile. This helped people realize that birds might have evolved from dinosaurs.

The second major fossil was found much later. It was discovered around 1971 near Nice, France.

This specimen was larger than the German one. For a long time, people thought it was a different species named Compsognathus corallestris. However, scientists later decided it was just another Compsognathus longipes. The German fossil was actually a juvenile, or a young dinosaur. That is why it was so small, about the size of a chicken.

The French fossil was larger and more grown-up. Some teeth found in a mine in Portugal might also belong to this group.

Thinking about Compsognathus helps us understand how dinosaurs lived. It was once called the smallest non-avian dinosaur. Non-avian means it was not a bird.

Since then, even smaller dinosaurs like Microraptor have been found. We also wonder what its skin looked like. Some of its relatives had simple feathers that looked like fur.

We have not found feathers on Compsognathus fossils yet. Some scientists found bumpy marks on its tail. These might have been scales or bony growths. It is a wonderful mystery that scientists are still studying today.