
Jaculinykus (meaning "Jaculus claw") is an extinct genus of alvarezsaurid theropod dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous Baruungoyot Formation of Mongolia. The genus contains a single species, J. yaruui, known from a nearly complete articulated skeleton including bones of the skull. Jaculinykus is notable for its unique hand, which has a hypertrophied first digit and greatly reduced second digit, which is intermediate between the tridactyl hand of Shuvuuia and monodactyl hand of Linhenykus.
Jaculinykus (meaning "Jaculus claw") is an extinct genus of alvarezsaurid theropod dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous Baruungoyot Formation of Mongolia. The genus contains a single species, J. yaruui, known from a nearly complete articulated skeleton including bones of the skull. Jaculinykus is notable for its unique hand, which has a hypertrophied first digit and greatly reduced second digit, which is intermediate between the tridactyl hand of Shuvuuia and monodactyl hand of Linhenykus.
== Discovery and naming == thumb|left|Occurrence of alvarezsaurids in Mongolia (Jaculinykus at center, zone 4) The Jaculinykus holotype specimen, MPC-D 100/209, was discovered in sediments of the Baruungoyot Formation (Nemegt locality), of Ömnögovi Province, Mongolia. The specimen consists of a nearly complete skeleton with most of the skull.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).