Half bird, half dinosaur
It had feathers and wings like a bird, but teeth, clawed fingers and a long bony tail like a dinosaur.
Jurassic Europe · Theropods
Archaeopteryx
Ancient wing · AR-kee-OP-ter-ix
A crow-sized animal with feathered wings, a long bony tail, teeth, and claws on its wings.
- Size
- About 50cm long; under 1kg
- Lived
- About 150 million years ago
- Found in
- Bavaria, Germany
Runs after you, wings half open. Move your pointer and see.
To scale
How big was it?
The bars are drawn to the same scale. On these pages the animals are sized in proportion to each other as far as a screen allows: the giants are shrunk a little and the smallest are enlarged, so that you can see them all.
Good to know
Six things about the archaeopteryx
Found at just the right moment
The first skeleton turned up in 1861, two years after Darwin published his theory of evolution.
Black feathers
Traces of pigment in a fossil feather show that at least some of its feathers were black.
Could it fly?
Probably, in short bursts. It lacked the big breastbone of modern birds.
Only about a dozen
Around twelve skeletons are known, all from the same area of Germany.
It lived on islands
Its home was a group of dry islands in a warm, shallow sea.
The real thing
Photos of the archaeopteryx
Photos are from Wikimedia Commons, used under the free licences shown. They have been resized, and cropped where they appear in link previews.
What it ate
Insects and other small animals.
How we know
The Solnhofen limestone preserved the outline of every feather.
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