XENOVENATOR
a dome-headed troodontid dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous of Mexico.
Pronunciation: ZEE-no-VEN-uh-tuh
Meaning: Strange hunter
Author/s: Rivera-Sylva
et al. (
2026)
Synonyms: None known
First Discovery: Coahuila, Mexico
Discovery Chart Position: #1188
Xenovenator espinosai
(Espinosa's Strange Hunter )Etymology
Xenovenator is derived from the Greek "xenos" (strange) and the Latin "venator" (hunter).
The
species epithet,
espinosai, honours Luis Espinosa, a pioneer in the study of Mexican
dinosaurs and mentor to many generations of paleontologists.
ZooBank registry:
urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:99513243-9B90-4903-82CC-93B7B5BB9805.
Discovery
The first remains of
Xenovenator were discovered in the Cerro Del Pueblo Formation at the La Parrita locality, 54 km west of Saltillo, municipality of General Cepeda, Coahuila, Mexico, by Martha C. Aguillón-Martinez in 2000.
The
holotype (CPC 2973) is most of a braincase.
The paratype (CPC 2976, found by Aguillón-Martinez at the holotype locality in 2004) is the left front part of a skull roof. The right front part of a skull roof (CPC 3112, from the Ejido Trincheras locality, 109 km west of Saltillo, municipality of Parras de la Fuente) was discovered in 2002 and anonymously donated to the Museo del Desierto (MUDE).
Estimations
Timeline:
Era: Mesozoic
Epoch: Late Cretaceous
Stage: Campanian
Age range: 73 mya
Stats:
Est. max. length: ?
Est. max. hip height: ?
Est. max. weight: ?
Diet: Carnivore
Xenovenator(?) robustus
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 who knows how long it will stay there.
References
• Sullivan RM (2006) "
Saurornitholestes robustus, n. sp. (Theropoda: Dromaeosauridae) from the Upper Cretaceous Kirtland Formation
(De-Na-Zin Member), San Juan Basin, New Mexico".
New Mexico Museum of Natural History, Science Bulletin, 35: 253–256.
• Evans DC, Larson DW, Cullen TM and Sullivan RM (2014) ""
Saurornitholestes"
robustus is a troodontid (Dinosauria: Theropoda)".
Canadian Journal of Earth Science, 51: 730–734.
• Serrano-Brañas CI, Espinosa-Chávez B, Maccracken SA and Torres-Rodríguez E (2024) "The Cerro del Pueblo Formation, Unlocking the Environmental Data of an Extraordinary Ancient Ecosystem from Mexico".
Page 405–426 in Guerrero-Arenas and Jiménez-Hidalgo (eds.) "Past Environments of Mexico". DOI: 10.1007/978-3-031-51034-2_18.
• Rivera-Sylva HE, Aguillón-Martinez MC, Flores-Ventura J, Sánchez-Uribe IE, Guzman-Gutierrez JR and Longrich NR (2026) "A Thick-Skulled Troodontid Theropod from the Late Cretaceous of Mexico".
Diversity, 18(1): 38. DOI: 10.3390/d18010038.
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To cite this page:
Atkinson, L.
"
XENOVENATOR :: from DinoChecker's dinosaur archive".
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http://www.dinochecker.com/dinosaurs/XENOVENATOR›. Web access: 06th Mar 2026.
