DINEVENATOR

Robert Sullivan named Saurornitholestes robustus in 2006 based on SMP VP-1955—a badly weathered skull bone (frontal)—from Alamo Wash in the De-na-zin Member of New Mexico's Kirtland Formation that was twice as thick as the corresponding bone of Saurornitholestes langstoni, and noted additional "Saurornitholestes" material—a tooth (SMP VP-1901) and a claw (SMP VP-1741)—from the same area, which he referred to cf. Saurornitholestes robustus. This was glorious news, because the De-na-zin Member is some 2 million years older than other Saurornitholestes-yielding quarries in Canada and North America, suggesting direct ancestry. A team of scientists, including Sullivan himself, re-visited SMP VP-1955 in 2014 and realised it wasn't a dromaeosaurid so it couldn't belong to Sauornitholestes, but was instead an indeterminate troodontid, which was glorious news too: it was the first non-dental skeletal record of a troodontid from the Kirtland Formation, and a rare record of this clade from the Kirtlandian land-vertebrate age. In 2026, the specimen was on the move again as Rivera-Sylva et al. tentatively assigned it to Xenovenator as Xenovenator(?) robustus, but how long would it stay there? Well, not very long. It was renamed Dinevenator robustus by Jasinski and Sullivan himself, halfway through 2026.