The Truth About The Smallest Dinosaur In The World

As ThoughtCo points out, the aforementioned compsognathus was, for a long time, considered to be the smallest dinosaur. After all, these pipsqueaks were only two feet long, and weighed five pounds, rendering them roughly the size of your Thanksgiving turkey. As with any dinosaur stat or ranking, though, it was only a matter of time before smaller dinosaurs were discovered. 

The Atlantic reports that one of the smaller dinosaurs in history was certainly the Yi qi (Mandarin for "strange wing"), pictured above, first discovered by a farmer in northeast China. Measuring about 23 inches, what made the Yi qi discovery additionally bizarre was its long wrist-rod, which suggests that the dinosaur had the leathery membranes of a bat. Picture a bird with bat wings, and you'll get the idea. Small as the yi qi might've been though, an even smaller — though otherwise quite similar — fossilized creature was also discovered in China, according to LiveScience, which measured only 13 inches, and was dubbed the Ambopteryx longibrachium. Yeah, that looks hard to say, but your six-year-old niece or nephew could probably teach you. Maybe.

Determining the smallest of the small isn't so cut and dry, however. From the "slender runner" known as Parvicursor to the 12 inch long Eosinopteryx brevipaenna, there are a lot of itsy-bitsy dinos. Sometimes there are false alarms, too: back in the seventies, the bones of the Argentinian Mussaurus, or "mouse lizard" were later found to belong to an infant, rather than an adult. Oops.

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