
Paraxenisaurus (, meaning "strange lizard") is an extinct genus of ornithomimosaurian theropod from the Late Cretaceous Cerro del Pueblo Formation of Coahuila in Mexico. The genus contains a single species, P. normalensis, which is known from a few bones of tail, hips, hands, and feet. The specific epithet was given in honor of the Benemérita Normal School of Coahuila, a teacher training institution, where the fossils were reposited. It is a member of the family Deinocheiridae and is the only member of that clade known from Laramidia.
Paraxenisaurus (, meaning "strange lizard") is an extinct genus of ornithomimosaurian theropod from the Late Cretaceous Cerro del Pueblo Formation of Coahuila in Mexico. The genus contains a single species, P. normalensis, which is known from a few bones of tail, hips, hands, and feet. The specific epithet was given in honor of the Benemérita Normal School of Coahuila, a teacher training institution, where the fossils were reposited. It is a member of the family Deinocheiridae and is the only member of that clade known from Laramidia.
==Discovery== thumb|left|An outcrop of the Cerro del Pueblo Formation, where Paraxenisaurus was found During the 1990s, ornithomimosaur fossils were discovered at three sites in the Cerro del Pueblo Formation of Coahuila state. The known specimens of Paraxenisaurus were collected from three different localities near the towns of Parras de la Fuente and General Cepeda. Two decades later, these remains were identified as belonging to a distinct North American ornithomimosaur taxon. In 2020, they were named and described by Mexican paleontologists Claudia Inés Serrano-Brañas, Belinda Espinosa-Chávez, Sarah Augusta Maccracken, Cirene Gutiérrez-Blando, Claudio de León-Dávila and José Flores Ventura.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).