Alvarezsaur

Animalia

Alvarezsaurs Temporal range: Late Jurassic-Late Cretaceous, 160–65.5 Ma PreЄ Є O S D C P T J K Pg N
Reconstructed skeleton of a Mononykus olecranus
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Class:	Reptilia
Superorder:	Dinosauria
Order:	Saurischia
Suborder:	Theropoda
Branch:	Maniraptora
Superfamily:	†Alvarezsauroidea Bonaparte, 1991
Type species
Alvarezsaurus calvoi Bonaparte, 1991
Subgroups
†Alvarezsauridae †Haplocheirus

Alvarezsauroidea is a group of small maniraptoran dinosaurs. Alvarezsauroidea, Alvaresauridae, and Alvarezsauria are named for the historian Don Gregorio Alvarez, not the more familiar physicist Luis Alvarez, who proposed that the Cretaceous-Tertiary extinction event was caused by an impact event. The group was first formally proposed by Choiniere and colleagues in 2010, to contain the family Alvarezsauridae and non-alvarezsaurid alvarezsauroids, namely Haplocheirus.^[1]

References

1. ^ Choiniere, J.N., Xu, X., Clark, J.M., Forster, C.A., Guo, Y. and Han, F. (2010). "A basal alvarezsauroid theropod from the early Late Jurassic of Xinjiang, China." Science, 327: 571-574. doi:10.1126/science.1182143 PMID 20110503

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