The skull was found in 1910 during work on a water reservoir at Minchinhampton in Gloucestershire, England.

Jurassic

Proceratosaurus

Proceratosaurus bradleyi

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Plenty to talk about here: how long ago it was, how a fossil forms, and how we can know so much about animals that died out millions of years ago.

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Quick facts

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Weight

25–45 kg

Length

3–3.5 m

Diet

Carnivore

Period

Jurassic

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Weight

25–45 kg

Length

3–3.5 m

Period

Jurassic

Locomotion

Bipedal

Height

0.8–1.1 m

Top Speed

35 km/h

Diet

Carnivore

Fossil finds

One recorded fossil find, in United Kingdom. First described in 1910 by Woodward.

Sites and counts from the Paleobiology Database

How long ago was that?

The timeline shows the whole age of dinosaurs – and how much time has passed since. The glowing part is when Proceratosaurus lived.

Proceratosaurus

Triassic

Jurassic

Cretaceous

After the dinosaursToday

25020015010050Todaymass extinction · 66

million years ago

Lived 168.3–165.3 million years ago

If the whole age of dinosaurs were a single day, Proceratosaurus lived at 10:59.

Chapter • Meet the dinosaur

Overview

Proceratosaurus bradleyi was a small, lightly built predatory dinosaur known from a single partial skull from the Middle Jurassic of England. The preserved skull is roughly 30 centimetres long, and from it researchers estimate a total body length of about three to three and a half metres and a weight of some 25 to 45 kilograms — no bigger than a large dog, but with a much longer tail. Its most distinctive feature is a thin, blade-like crest that rose from the nasal bones just behind the nostrils. The crest is broken in the fossil, so its full height is unknown, but it was built of thin bone and cannot have served as a weapon. The jaws carried small, forward-curving, finely serrated teeth, and the front teeth of the lower jaw were especially slender and almost needle-like. Like other small tyrannosauroids, Proceratosaurus very probably bore a coat of simple, hair-like filamentous feathers, since close relatives such as Dilong and Yutyrannus are preserved with exactly those structures.

Chapter • Where it lived

Habitat

CoastWoodlandForest

Proceratosaurus lived in the Bathonian stage of the Middle Jurassic, roughly 168 to 166 million years ago. The only known skull was recovered in 1910 from limestones of the Great Oolite Group (Chipping Norton or White Limestone level) at Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, England. Those rocks formed in a warm, shallow tropical sea, which means the carcass must have been washed out from nearby land. Jurassic Britain was then a scatter of low islands and coastal plains within a wider European archipelago, clothed in conifers, cycads, ginkgoes and ferns, with no grasses and no flowering trees. Proceratosaurus most likely hunted in coastal woodland and on beach flats where small vertebrates were easy to catch.

Chapter • Wild behavior

Behavior & Ecology

Activity Pattern

Cathemeral

Social Behavior

Almost nothing is known about the social life of Proceratosaurus, because only one individual has ever been found. There are no trackways, nest sites or bone beds that could show whether it lived alone or in groups. Most researchers assume that a predator of this size hunted singly or in loose, temporary associations, but that is an inference drawn from other small theropods rather than evidence from the fossil itself. The nasal crest may have functioned as a visual signal towards mates or rivals, though this too remains an interpretation.

Did you know?

The name means roughly "before Ceratosaurus": in 1926 Friedrich von Huene thought the animal was an early ancestor of the horned Ceratosaurus — an idea later shown to be wrong.

The species name bradleyi honours Francis Lewis Bradley, who passed the fossil on to the Natural History Museum in London.

The skull was found in 1910 during work on a water reservoir at Minchinhampton in Gloucestershire, England.

Proceratosaurus is one of the oldest known tyrannosauroids — the lineage that more than 100 million years later produced Tyrannosaurus rex.

Only the one skull is known; not a single bone from the body, limbs or tail has ever been found.

A CT scan published in 2010 revealed the braincase and internal air spaces and confirmed the animal's tyrannosauroid identity.

Its closest known relative is the crested Guanlong from China, which lived a few million years later.

During the Bathonian, southern England lay as an archipelago in a warm, shallow sea, so Proceratosaurus was an island hunter on low-lying coastal ground.

Chapter • Scientific place

Taxonomy

KingdomAnimalia

ClassReptilia

OrderSaurischia

FamilyProceratosauridae

SpeciesProceratosaurus bradleyi

Sources and review

International Commission on Stratigraphy – Chronostratigraphic Chart update

stratigraphy.org

Reviewed: 9/8/2026

VERIFY:period_end_mya: stored=166.1 suggested=165.3 confidence=medium — The ICS revised the base of the Callovian (i.e. the top of the Bathonian) to 165.3 ± 1.1 Ma, replacing the older 166.1 ± 1.2 Ma value that is still stored; PaleoBioDB likewise lists the Bathonian as 168.2–165.3 Ma per the ICS v2024/12 chart. The stored start value (168.3 vs 168.2 Ma) is within rounding/uncertainty and is not flagged.

Proceratosaurus

What did Proceratosaurus usually eat?

Fossil finds

How long ago was that?

Overview

Habitat

Behavior & Ecology

Did you know?

Taxonomy

International Commission on Stratigraphy – Chronostratigraphic Chart update

Cranial osteology and phylogenetic position of the theropod dinosaur Proceratosaurus bradleyi (Woodward, 1910) from the Middle Jurassic of England