Neovenatoridae

 Neovenatoridae is a family of large carnivorous dinosaurs representing a branch of the allosauroids, a large group of carnosaurs that also includes the sinraptorids, carcharodontosaurids, and allosaurids. Compared to other allosauroids, neovenatorids had short, wide shoulder blades, and their ilia (upper hip bones) had many cavities.^[1] They lived in Africa, Asia, Europe, South America and North America.

Neovenatorids Temporal range:  Early to Late Cretaceous, 130–88 Ma  PreꞒ Ꞓ O S D C P T J K Pg N Possible Late Maastrichtian record
Restoration of Neovenator salerii
Scientific classification
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Clade:	Dinosauria
Clade:	Saurischia
Clade:	Theropoda
Clade:	†Carcharodontosauria
Family:	†Neovenatoridae Benson, Carrano & Brusatte, 2010
Type species
†Neovenator salerii Hutt, Martill, & Barker, 1996
Subgroups
†Chilantaisaurus †Gualicho †Neovenator †Siats †Megaraptora

ClassificationEdit

Phylogenetic studies conducted by Benson, Carrano and Brusatte (2010) and Carrano, Benson and Sampson (2012) recovered the group Megaraptora as members of the Neovenatoridae. This would make neovenatorids the latest-surviving allosauroids; at least one megaraptoran, Orkoraptor, lived near the end of the Mesozoic era, dating to the early Maastrichtian stage of the latest Cretaceousperiod, about 70 million years ago.^[1][2] On the other hand, Novas et al. (2012), while confirming that Neovenator was closely related to carcharodontosaurids, simultaneously found Megaraptor and related genera to be coelurosaurs closely related to tyrannosaurids.^[3] However, Novas et al. subsequently found that megaraptorans lacked most of the key features in the hands of derived coelurosaurs including Guanlongand Deinonychus. Instead, their hands retain a number of primitive characteristics seen in basal tetanurans such as Allosaurus. Nevertheless, there are still a number of other traits that support megaraptorans as members of the Coelurosauria.^[4]

The cladogram below follows a 2016 analysis by Sebastián Apesteguía, Nathan D. Smith, Rubén Juarez Valieri, and Peter J. Makovicky based on the dataset of Carrano et al.(2012).^[5]

Allosauroidea	Metriacanthosauridae     Allosauria   Allosauridae     Carcharodontosauria   Carcharodontosauridae    Neovenatoridae     Deltadromeus       Gualicho           Neovenator         Chilantaisaurus       Megaraptora

This article uses material from the Wikipedia article  Metasyntactic variable, which is released under the  Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.