Compsognathus

Chapter • Meet the dinosaur

Overview

Compsognathus is one of the smallest dinosaurs known from Europe. The German specimen measured only about 80 centimetres from snout to tail tip and weighed roughly as much as a domestic chicken, while the larger French specimen reached around 1.25 metres. The body was slender and lightly built, the neck long and flexible, and the head small and narrow with numerous tiny, sharp, slightly recurved teeth. Its hind limbs were strikingly long — the species name longipes means "long foot" — while the arms were short and ended in hands with just two functional clawed fingers. A long, stiffened tail acted as a balancing pole during fast running and sharp turns. Exactly what Compsognathus looked like on the outside is still debated. The French Canjuers specimen preserves small patches of skin impression that appear scaly, and the closely related Juravenator from the same age shows scales alongside a few filament-like structures. Other relatives, such as the Chinese Sinosauropteryx, are covered in simple downy protofeathers. Many researchers therefore assume Compsognathus may have carried at least a partial coat of filaments, but no direct feather evidence exists for this species. Modern reconstructions show it in a horizontal posture with the tail held clear of the ground, never dragging. Compsognathus was a fleet-footed carnivore that hunted small prey. The best-preserved German skeleton contains the remains of a small, agile lizard in its body cavity — Bavarisaurus, now described under the name Schoenesmahl. The prey had been swallowed whole, which suggests Compsognathus was quick enough to catch highly mobile animals and gulped them down in one piece. Its diet probably also included insects, small mammals, crustaceans and carrion washed up along the lagoon shores. Computer simulations of its gait indicate it could sprint remarkably fast for its size, perhaps up to around 60 kilometres per hour in short bursts. The first specimen was collected from the Solnhofen Limestone of Bavaria around 1859 and described the same year by German palaeontologist Johann Andreas Wagner. The fossil quickly became famous: when Thomas Henry Huxley argued in the 1860s that birds descend from dinosaurs, he used Compsognathus and the early bird Archaeopteryx as his key comparison, since both come from the same limestone beds and are strikingly similar in skeletal anatomy. A second, larger skeleton was excavated near Canjuers in south-eastern France in the early 1970s and initially named Compsognathus corallestris, but it is now generally regarded as a larger or older individual of C. longipes.

Chapter • Where it lived

Habitat

Compsognathus lived in the Late Jurassic, during the Tithonian stage roughly 150 million years ago, in a landscape nothing like modern Europe. What is now Bavaria and Provence was then an archipelago of low, arid limestone islands surrounded by warm, hypersaline lagoons on the northern margin of the tropical Tethys Ocean. Drought-tolerant conifers, cycads and ferns grew in open stands on the islands, while the oxygen-poor lagoon floors buried dead animals in exquisite detail. The fossils come from two classic localities: the Solnhofen Limestone of southern Germany, where the first skeleton was recovered around 1859, and Canjuers in south-eastern France, where a larger individual was found in the early 1970s. The same deposits have also yielded Archaeopteryx along with countless fish, squid and pterosaurs.

Chapter • Wild behavior

Behavior & Ecology

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Chapter • Scientific place

Taxonomy