
Citipes () is an extinct genus of caenagnathid theropod from the Late Cretaceous Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada. The genus contains only one species, the type species, C. elegans. The generic name of Citipes is Latin for "fleet-footed", and the specific epithet "elegans" is Latin for "elegant". The type specimen of Citipes has a convoluted taxonomic history, and has been previously assigned to the genera Ornithomimus, Macrophalangia, Elmisaurus, Chirostenotes, and Leptorhynchos before being given its own genus in 2020. ==Discovery and naming== ===Initial discovery=== thumb|left|An
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Citipes () is an extinct genus of caenagnathid theropod from the Late Cretaceous Dinosaur Park Formation in Alberta, Canada. The genus contains only one species, the type species, C. elegans. The generic name of Citipes is Latin for "fleet-footed", and the specific epithet "elegans" is Latin for "elegant". The type specimen of Citipes has a convoluted taxonomic history, and has been previously assigned to the genera Ornithomimus, Macrophalangia, Elmisaurus, Chirostenotes, and Leptorhynchos before being given its own genus in 2020. ==Discovery and naming== ===Initial discovery=== thumb|left|An outcrop of the Dinosaur Park Formation, where the holotype of Citipes was found The material which would eventually be named Citipes was discovered in 1926 during one of the University of Toronto's expeditions to the Sand Creek area of the Red Deer River. This locality was a part of the Belly River Group, which is now recognized as the Dinosaur Park Formation. However, it would be another seven years before a full description of this material was published in the University of Toronto's geology journal in 1933 by Dr. William A. Parks. The material, consisting of three metatarsals, was reposited at the Royal Ontario Museum and was given the designation ROM 781.
It was named as a new species of the common genus Ornithomimus — Ornithomimus elegans. This name was assigned based on three metatarsals, which were believed to belong to an ornithomimosaur because of the lack of a fifth metatarsal bone. Oviraptorosauria was not yet recognized as a unique clade, and several oviraptorans, including Oviraptor and Chirostenotes, were believed to be ornithomimids. It would not be until 1976 that oviraptorosaurs became recognized as their own unique clade. ===Taxonomic history=== ROM 781 was reassigned to the dubious genus Macrophalangia by Dale Russell in 1972. However, this genus was made a junior synonym of Chirostenotes a few years later.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).