Dzharaonyx (meaning "Dzharakuduk claw", named after the type locality) is a genus of alvarezsaurid theropod from the Late Cretaceous Bissekty Formation of Uzbekistan. The type and only species is D. eski. The specific epithet "eski" is an Uzbek word for "old". ==Discovery and naming== thumb|left|A map of the locality where Dzharaonyx was found in Uzbekistan (red star) All remains of Dzharaonyx were discovered at a single locality called Dzharakuduk, which is in the Kyzylkum Desert of Uzbekistan. The first remains belonging to alvarezsaurid dinosaurs, which would later be referred to Dzharaonyx
Dzharaonyx (meaning "Dzharakuduk claw", named after the type locality) is a genus of alvarezsaurid theropod from the Late Cretaceous Bissekty Formation of Uzbekistan. The type and only species is D. eski. The specific epithet "eski" is an Uzbek word for "old". ==Discovery and naming== thumb|left|A map of the locality where Dzharaonyx was found in Uzbekistan (red star) All remains of Dzharaonyx were discovered at a single locality called Dzharakuduk, which is in the Kyzylkum Desert of Uzbekistan. The first remains belonging to alvarezsaurid dinosaurs, which would later be referred to Dzharaonyx were discovered by Lev Nesov during the period between 1977-1994 who was a paleontologist employed by the Soviet Union. Additional remains would be found in the period between 1997-2006 by the so-called "URBAC joint-paleontological expedition", so named because it involved the collaboration of five countries — Uzbekistan, Russia, Britain, America, and Canada. During both of these periods of expedition, remains from alvarezsaurs were exceedingly rare. As of a 2017 publication, only seven bones confidently attributable to alvarezsaurs had been found out of over 3500 catalogued dinosaur fossils. These remains, in spite of being extremely fragmentary, were readily identifiable as alvarezsaurid remains because of the extremely distinctive morphology of alvarezsaur hand and tail anatomy.
Although many of the specimens which would later be referred to Dzharaonyx were described in 2017, the taxon was not fully described and given a name until 2022 when Alexander Averianov and Hans Dieter-Sues published on it. In the intervening five years, additional specimens were recovered that were eventually all referred to the new taxon Dzharaonyx in 2022. Averianov and Sues reported that there was no evidence that more than one alvarezsaurid taxon existed in the area, and so all of the remains attributable to alvarezsaurids from the Dzharakuduk locality were referred to this new genus, even though these remains were not all found in the same place.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).