Definitions

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 5th Edition.

  • noun Any of various theropod dinosaurs of the diverse group Coelurosauria of the Jurassic and Cretaceous Periods, having a stiff tail, hingelike ankle, usually long forelimbs, and sometimes featherlike structures, and including oviraptor and T. rex.

from Wiktionary, Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License.

  • noun Any of several small theropod dinosaurs of the clade Coelurosauria

Etymologies

from The American Heritage® Dictionary of the English Language, 4th Edition

[From New Latin Coelūrosauria, group name : Greek koilos, hollow; see keuə- in Indo-European roots + Greek ourā, tail; see ors- in Indo-European roots + Greek sauros, lizard.]

Support

Help support Wordnik (and make this page ad-free) by adopting the word coelurosaur.

Examples

  • Eotyrannus lengi, a new coelurosaur from the Isle of Wight.

    Archive 2006-06-01 Darren Naish 2006

  • The news is that a controversial little coelurosaur from the Isle of Wight’s Wessex Formation, Calamosaurus foxi (known only from two cervical vertebrae, one of them incomplete), is so similar to the cervical vertebrae of Dilong that I am confident that it too should be identified as a basal tyrannosauroid.

    Archive 2006-06-01 Darren Naish 2006

  • If so-called compsognathids – all of them relatively small, ecologically and morphologically generalized, long-limbed, long-tailed theropods that hunt small vertebrate prey – are not a clade but are actually scattered about the base of the coelurosaur family tree, this likely indicates that this ecotype was the ancestral one for coelurosaurs.

    Archive 2006-06-01 Darren Naish 2006

  • A new study finds many more coelurosaur plant-eaters than previously known.

    FOXNews.com foxnewsonline@foxnews.com 2010

  • During the Late Jurassic, 160 million to 140 million years ago, the first birds evolved from small coelurosaur dinosaurs.

    1. MajorityRights.com (main blog) 2010

  • Rapator ornitholestoides has been considered to represent an alvarezsaurid coelurosaur

    PLoS ONE Alerts: New Articles Scott A. Hocknull et al. 2009

Comments

Log in or sign up to get involved in the conversation. It's quick and easy.