a small, carnivorous, or meat-eating, dinosaur that inhabited Europe during the late Jurassic period, about 144 to 163 million years ago. It is the sole member of the family Compsognathidae, which belongs to the lizard-hipped dinosaur order, Saurischia. Compsognathus was one of the smallest of all dinosaurs, standing no higher than a chicken, and was similar in structure to Archaeopteryx, the first known bird. Compsognathus was bipedal, which means that it stood upright and walked on two legs. The arms were short and slender, and the hands had two fingers with sharp claws. The delicate, birdlike legs were long in relation to the body; each foot had three toes with claws and a dewclaw (a reduced toe located above and behind the ankle area). With its long legs and light body, Compsognathus was probably capable of sprinting after swift prey. The first fossil evidence of Compsognathus was an essentially complete skeleton discovered in Bavaria in southern Germany in the late 1850s. A larger, similarly intact skeleton was unearthed near Nice in southern France in 1972. The remains of a young Bavarisaurus—a small, fleet lizard—were found in the stomach cavity of the first skeleton, attesting to the speed and agility of Compsognathus. |