Procompsognathus

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Procompsognathus
Fossil of Procompsognathus triassicus in the State Museum for Natural History Stuttgart.

Fossil of Procompsognathus triassicus in the State Museum for Natural History Stuttgart .

Temporal occurrence
Upper Triassic (middle norium )
217.4 to 214 million years
Locations
  • Württemberg, Germany
Systematics
Lizard dinosaur (Saurischia)
Theropoda
Ceratosauria
Coelophysoidea
Coelophysidae
Procompsognathus
Scientific name
Procompsognathus
Fraas , 1913
Art
  • Procompsognathus triassicus

Procompsognathus was a small, carnivorous dinosaur native to Northern Europe. The only species described so far, P. triassicus, can be dated to the late Triassic (middle Norium ). The five-fingered dinosaur is likely to have mainlyfed onsmaller lizards and insects .

features

Procompsognathus was about four feet long and ran on its hind legs ( Bipedie ). Corresponding to this gait, its hind legs were long, while the front legs were short and equipped with long hands and claws that made it possible to grasp prey. The head had a long and narrow snout , which was equipped with many small teeth. The tail was long and stiff. Procompsognathus lived in arid areas and most likely hunted insects, lizards and other prey.

Systematics

The only surviving fossil of the Procompsognathus triassicus is in a very poor state of preservation, which makes it difficult to provide more precise characteristics and thus a taxonomic classification. As a rule, Procompsognathus is classified as a theropod , but there are also scientists who place it in the ornithodira outside of the dinosaurs .

John Ostrom re- examined the find in 1981, classified it as a dinosaur, but contradicted a relationship with Compsognathus, as Fraas assumed. Rupert Wild and Paul Sereno thought the find of the holotype was a chimera , whereby they assigned the skull to the crocodile-related Saltoposuchus and only the rear part to a Coelophysidae . Sankar Chatterjee contradicted the classification of the skull in 1993 .

According to Rauhut and Hungerbuhler (2000), the eddies have various features that speak for a classification in the Coelophysidae or Ceratosauridae and Carrano et al. (2005) come to the conclusion in their investigation of the closely related Segisaurus that both species belong to the Coelophysidae.

The classification of two other finds from the same quarry is also controversial, a skull (twice as large as in the holotype) from 1908 and a left hand from 1909. They were earlier ( Friedrich von Huene 1921) also ascribed to Procompsognathus. According to John Ostrom (1982), however, they do not belong to the same taxon as the holotype.

designation

The Procompsognathus got its name from Eberhard Fraas in 1913 , who assumed that this dinosaur was an ancestor of the Compsognathus . The holotype specimen was found in 1909 in the Burrer quarry on Stromberg near Pfaffenhofen . It is distributed over three stone blocks, the skull 6–7 cm long is severely deformed.

swell

  1. ^ Gregory S. Paul : The Princeton Field Guide To Dinosaurs. Princeton University Press, Princeton NJ 2010, ISBN 978-0-691-13720-9 , p. 72, online .
  2. ^ David Allen: The phylogenetic status of Procompsognathus revisited. In: Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Vol. 24, Supplement 3, 2004, ISSN  0272-4634 , p. 34A.
  3. ^ John H. Ostrom : Procompsognathus. Theropod or Thecodont? In: Palaeontographica. Department A: Paleozoology, Stratigraphy. Vol. 175, 1981, ISSN  0375-0442 , pp. 179-195.
  4. ^ Paul C. Sereno , Rupert Wild : Procompsognathus: Theropod, "Thecodont" or both? In: Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Vol. 12, No. 4, 1992, pp. 435-458, doi : 10.1080 / 02724634.1992.10011473 .
  5. ^ Sankar Chatterjee : Procompsognathus from the Triassic of Germany is not a crocodylomorph. In: Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Vol. 13, Supplement 3, 1993, p. 29A.
  6. ↑ Oliver WM Rauhut , Axel Hungerbühler: A review of European Triassic theropods. In: Gaia. Revista de Geociências. Vol. 15, 2000, pp. 75-88, digital version (PDF; 4.96 MB) .
  7. ^ Matthew T. Carrano, John R. Hutchinson, Scott D. Sampson: New information on Segisaurus halli, a small theropod dinosaur from the Early Jurassic of Arizona. In: Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Vol. 25, No. 4, 2005, pp. 835-849, doi : 10.1671 / 0272-4634 (2005) 025 [0835: NIOSHA] 2.0.CO; 2 .
  8. ^ Ernst Probst , Raymund Windolf: Dinosaurs in Germany. Bertelsmann, Munich 1993, ISBN 3-570-02314-1 , p. 121 ff.

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