Procompsognathus triassicus
Procompsognathus was a small, lightly built predatory dinosaur barely a metre long from snout to tail tip – roughly turkey-sized, but with an enormously long tail. Its body was slender, its neck flexible, and its hind limbs long and thin, with three weight-bearing toes.
Procompsognathus
Procompsognathus triassicus
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Quick facts
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Weight
1–3 kg
Length
1–1.2 m
Diet
Carnivore
Period
Triassic
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1–3 kg
1–1.2 m
Triassic
Bipedal
30–50 cm
30 km/h
Carnivore
Regions where fossils have been found, shown by present-day continent.
The timeline shows the whole age of dinosaurs – and how much time has passed since. The glowing part is when Procompsognathus lived.
million years ago
Lived 215–210 million years ago
If the whole age of dinosaurs were a single day, Procompsognathus lived at 05:05.
Chapter • Meet the dinosaur
Procompsognathus was a small, lightly built predatory dinosaur barely a metre long from snout to tail tip – roughly turkey-sized, but with an enormously long tail. Its body was slender, its neck flexible, and its hind limbs long and thin, with three weight-bearing toes. The arms were short and ended in small grasping hands. The stiffened tail was carried straight out behind as a balancing rod, so the animal moved in a horizontal posture and never dragged its tail along the ground. Its long, narrow jaws held many small, sharp, slightly recurved teeth – the dentition of an animal that fed on insects and small vertebrates. No feather impressions are known for Procompsognathus, but because simple filament-like feathers occur in several other theropods, many researchers now restore small Triassic predators like this one with at least a sparse covering of fuzz. That is a reasonable inference, not a demonstrated fact.
Chapter • Where it lived
Procompsognathus lived about 215–210 million years ago, during the Norian stage of the Late Triassic. All secure material comes from the Löwenstein Formation (Middle Stubensandstein) near Pfaffenhofen in Baden-Württemberg, Germany. The landscape was one of broad plains and river floodplains crossed by shallow, seasonally drying channels and sand bars, under a warm, strongly seasonal, semi-arid climate. Ferns, horsetails, conifers and cycad-like plants grew along the watercourses, while the ground between the rivers could be almost desert-like. Procompsognathus shared this world with early crocodile-line reptiles, rhynchocephalians, small lizard-like reptiles and other early dinosaurs.
Chapter • Wild behavior
Procompsognathus is known from essentially a single skeleton, and no site preserves several individuals together, so we simply do not know whether it lived alone or in groups. Mass accumulations of close relatives such as Coelophysis show only that such assemblages can form – they may reflect floods or drying waterholes just as easily as social behaviour. The image of hunting 'compy packs' comes from fiction, not from fossils.
The name means roughly 'before the elegant jaw', referring to its resemblance to the much younger Jurassic dinosaur Compsognathus.
The species was described in 1913 by the German palaeontologist Eberhard Fraas.
The holotype, SMNS 12591, comes from Baden-Württemberg in south-western Germany and is housed in the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde in Stuttgart.
The fossil is badly crushed and incomplete, which is why its exact position in the theropod family tree is still debated.
A skull (SMNS 12352) was long referred to Procompsognathus, but several researchers argue it belongs instead to a crocodile-line reptile similar to Saltoposuchus.
Procompsognathus lived in the Late Triassic, far earlier than famous dinosaurs such as Tyrannosaurus – the gap between them is greater than the gap between Tyrannosaurus and us.
In Michael Crichton's novels Jurassic Park and The Lost World, the small pack-hunting 'compys' are Procompsognathus, not Compsognathus.
At only a couple of kilograms, it is one of the smallest dinosaurs known from the Triassic of Europe.
Chapter • Scientific place
www.dinochecker.com
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
VERIFY:weight_max_kg: stored=3 suggested=1.5 confidence=medium — Current estimates based on the holotype SMNS 12591 give a maximum mass of roughly 1.5 kg, with other summaries of the literature citing about 1-1.3 kg (chicken-sized); a 3 kg upper bound is roughly double what the material supports.
Open sourcewww.dinochecker.com
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
VERIFY:height_max_m: stored=0.5 suggested=0.3 confidence=low — Published figures give a maximum hip height of about 0.26-0.3 m for this roughly 1 m long coelophysoid, so a 0.5 m upper value is high unless the field is intended as standing head height.
Open sourceJournal of Vertebrate Paleontology (Taylor & Francis)
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
Sereno & Wild's 1992 re-evaluation of the type material establishes Procompsognathus triassicus as a small coelophysoid theropod within Neotheropoda, the basis of its Dinosauria–Saurischia–Theropoda–Coelophysidae lineage.
Open sourceFossil Record (Pensoft), deposited in Zenodo
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
Sues & Schoch (2025) give the type locality as the "Weisser Steinbruch" near Pfaffenhofen, Heilbronn district, Baden-Württemberg, and the type horizon as the Middle Stubensandstein (S2) of the Löwenstein Formation, defining the taxon's known geographic and stratigraphic range.
Open sourceNeues Jahrbuch für Geologie und Paläontologie – Abhandlungen (Schweizerbart Science Publishers)
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
Reconstructs the fluvial floodplain, channel-and-sandbar palaeoenvironment and seasonally semi-arid climate of the Stubensandstein of the Löwenstein Formation, the setting in which Procompsognathus lived.
Open sourceNatural History Museum, London
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
The museum's Dino Directory entry classifies Procompsognathus as a carnivorous (meat-eating) small theropod.
Open sourceSwiss Journal of Geosciences (Springer)
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
Extinct taxon; conservation status NE
Open sourceGeobios (Elsevier)
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
A detailed re-examination of the holotype postcranial skeleton providing the authoritative anatomical overview of the species (size, build, limb and vertebral morphology) used for the general description text.
Open sourceGeobios (Elsevier)
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
A detailed re-examination of the holotype postcranial skeleton providing the authoritative anatomical overview of the species (size, build, limb and vertebral morphology) used for the general description text.
Open sourceGeobios (Elsevier)
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
A detailed re-examination of the holotype postcranial skeleton providing the authoritative anatomical overview of the species (size, build, limb and vertebral morphology) used for the general description text.
Open sourceGeobios (Elsevier)
Reviewed: 9/6/2026
A detailed re-examination of the holotype postcranial skeleton providing the authoritative anatomical overview of the species (size, build, limb and vertebral morphology) used for the general description text.
Open source