Hollow bones
Its name means hollow form, after its light, hollow bones. They made it fast.
The first dinosaurs · Theropods
Coelophysis
Hollow form · SEE-lo-FY-sis
A slim, lightly built hunter with a long neck, a long narrow snout and a very long tail.
- Size
- About 3m long; 20 to 25kg
- Lived
- About 215 to 200 million years ago
- Found in
- New Mexico and Arizona, USA
Trots after you, quick and light. 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 coelophysis
Found by the hundred
At Ghost Ranch in New Mexico, hundreds of skeletons were found together, perhaps caught by a flash flood.
Sharp eyes
It had large eyes that faced partly forwards, good for judging distance.
It has been into space
A Coelophysis skull was carried aboard a space shuttle in 1998.
A wishbone
It had a wishbone, like a bird. It is one of the earliest dinosaurs known to have one.
Built to run
Long legs and a light body made it one of the fastest animals of its time.
The real thing
Photos of the coelophysis
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
Small reptiles, insects and fish, caught with quick snaps of its narrow jaws full of small, sharp teeth.
How we know
The Ghost Ranch bone bed gives us skeletons of every age, from young to adult, so we know how it grew up.
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