This is without a doubt one of the most complete and one of the most spectacular dinosaur fossils ever found. It’s a small theropod dinosaur, a group of ancestral predators from the Mesozoic.
Oliver Rauhut, who was one of the authors of the study that described the dinosaurs, writes:
“It is a small theropod dinosaur (total length c. 70 cm) preserved lying on its right side in complete articulation. It comes from thin-banked to laminated limestones that lie below the famous Solnhofen limestones (from where the primary bird Archaeopteryx is derived), and is thus slightly older, dating back to the Late Kimmeridgian (some 151-152 million years old).”
The fossil had been found in systematic excavations in a limestone quarry at Painten, north-eastern Bavaria, by a crew of fossil enthusiast and commercial collector Raimund Albersdoerfer, somewhen in the mid 2000s.