# Coelophysis bauri

> One of the earliest known theropods, a slender, 3 m predator from the Late Triassic of New Mexico. Hundreds of skeletons from the Ghost Ranch quarry make it one of the best-known early dinosaurs.

- Classification: Dinosauria (clade) > Saurischia (clade) > Theropoda (clade) > Neotheropoda (clade) > Coelophysoidea (superfamily) > Coelophysidae (family) > Coelophysis (genus) > Coelophysis bauri (species)
- Length: 3 m
- Hip height: 0.5–0.7 m
- Mass: 15–25 kg
- Age: 205.7–201.4 million years ago (Late Triassic)
- Fossils found in: Chinle Formation (New Mexico); United States
- Diet: carnivore
- Described: Edward Drinker Cope, 1887

Canonical page: https://dinodex.club/dinosaurs/coelophysis-bauri
Last updated: 2026-09-27

## Overview

Coelophysis bauri lived at the end of the Triassic in what is now northern New Mexico, near the equator of the supercontinent Pangaea. Edward Drinker Cope named its first, fragmentary bones as Coelurus bauri in 1887 and moved them to the new genus Coelophysis in 1889.

In 1947 George Whitaker, in Edwin Colbert's American Museum crew, found a bonebed at Ghost Ranch packed with complete skeletons of all sizes. Because Cope's scrappy type bones could not be matched to them with certainty, the ICZN made a complete Ghost Ranch skeleton, AMNH 7224, the neotype in 1996.

It was a lightly built, two-legged hunter up to about 3 m long with a long, narrow head and grasping hands. Some Ghost Ranch skeletons were long said to hold eaten juveniles of their own kind, but Nesbitt and colleagues (2006) showed the "gut contents" were small crocodile-line reptiles, not young Coelophysis.

## Name meaning

"Hollow form", from Greek koilos ("hollow") and physis ("form"), for its hollow bones; bauri honours the palaeontologist Georg Baur (Cope 1887, 1889).

## Sources

1. (2026). Paleobiology Database: Coelophysis bauri collections 48422 (Ghost Ranch) and 52498 (Arroyo Seco). The Paleobiology Database (paleobiodb.org), data service 1.2, accessed 2026-09-23. https://paleobiodb.org/data1.2/colls/list.json?coll_id=48422,52498&show=paleoloc,strat,loc,ref,geo&pgm=gplates&vocab=pbdb
2. (2026). Wikipedia: Coelophysis. Wikipedia (English), accessed 2026-09-24. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coelophysis
3. Colbert, E. H. (1947). The little dinosaurs of Ghost Ranch. Natural History 56(9).
4. Cope, E. D. (1887). The dinosaurian genus Coelurus. American Naturalist 21: 367-369.
5. Nesbitt, S. J., Turner, A. H., Erickson, G. M. & Norell, M. A. (2006). Prey choice and cannibalistic behaviour in the theropod Coelophysis. Biology Letters 2: 611-614. https://doi.org/10.1098/rsbl.2006.0524
6. Paul, G. S. (2016). The Princeton Field Guide to Dinosaurs (2nd edition). Princeton University Press.

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Cite as: "Coelophysis bauri". DinoDex. https://dinodex.club/dinosaurs/coelophysis-bauri (updated 2026-09-27).