Wikipedia:Today's featured article/January 12, 2012



Compsognathus is a monotypic genus of small, bipedal, carnivorous theropod dinosaur. The species Compsognathus longipes was the size of a turkey and lived around 150 million years ago, the early Tithonian stage of the late Jurassic Period, in what is now Europe. Paleontologists have found two well-preserved fossils, one in Germany in the 1850s and the second in France more than a century later. Many presentations still describe Compsognathus as a "chicken-sized" dinosaur because of the small size of the German specimen, which is now believed to be a juvenile form of the larger French specimen. Compsognathus is one of the few dinosaurs for which the diet is known with certainty: the remains of small, agile lizards are preserved in the bellies of both specimens. Although not recognized as such at the time of its discovery, Compsognathus is the first theropod dinosaur known from a reasonably complete fossil skeleton. Until the 1990s, it was the smallest known non-avialan dinosaur and the closest supposed relative of the early bird Archaeopteryx. Thus, its genus is one of the few dinosaur genera to be well known outside of paleontological circles. (more...)

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