AORUN
a carnivorous coelurosaurian theropod dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic of China.
Pronunciation: AW-roon
Meaning: Ao Run (the Dragon King)
Author/s: Choiniere
et al. (
2013)
Synonyms: None known
First Discovery: Xinjiang, China
Discovery Chart Position: #841
Aorun zhaoi
(Zhou's Dragon King of the West)Etymology
Aorun is derived from the Mandarin Chinese "Ao Run" (The Dragon King of the West in the epic Journey to the West).
The
species epithet,
zhaoi, honors Professor Zhao Xi-jin,
who led several important vertebrate palaeontological expeditions to the Junggar Basin and introduced three of the paper's authors to the field area.
ZooBank registry:
urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:37A1076B-FF09-478C-A941-54F855DAC57A.
Discovery
The remains of
Aorun were discovered at Wucaiwan in the Shishugou Formation, Xinjiang, People's Republic of China, by James Clark during a VPP-GWU Field Expedition in 2006.
The
holotype (IVPP V15709) is a skull and partially articulated skeleton consisting of cervical (neck), dorsal (back) and caudal (tail) vertebrae, left lower arm bone and hand, a hip bone and some foot bones of a juvenile individual, no more than one year old.
Aorun is the seventh theropod, and currently the oldest coelurosaurian dinosaur, known from the Shishugou Formation.
Estimations
Timeline:
Era: Mesozoic
Epoch: Middle Jurassic
Stage: Callovian
Age range: 164-161 mya
Stats:
Est. max. length: 1 meters
Est. max. hip height: ?
Est. max. weight: 2 Kg
Diet: Carnivore
References
• Choiniere JN, Clark JM, Forster CA, Norell MA, Eberth DA, Erickson GM, Chu H and Xu X (2013) "
A juvenile specimen of a new coelurosaur (Dinosauria: Theropoda) from the
Middle-Late Jurassic Shishugou Formation of Xinjiang, People's Republic of China".
Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, 12(2): 177-215. DOI: 10.1080/14772019.2013.781067.
• Xu X, Choiniere JN, Tan Q, Benson RBJ, Clark JM, Sullivan C, Zhao Q, Han F, Ma Q, He Y, Wang S, Xing H and Tan L (2018) "Two Early Cretaceous fossils document transitional stages in alvarezsaurian dinosaur evolution".
Current Biology. Online edition. DOI: 10.1016/j.cub.2018.07.057.
• Agnolín FL, Lu J-C, Kundrát M and Xu L (2022) "Alvarezsaurid osteology: new data on cranial anatomy".
Historical Biology. 34 (3): 443–452. DOI: 10.1080/08912963.2021.1929203.
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To cite this page:
Atkinson, L.
"
AORUN :: from DinoChecker's dinosaur archive".
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http://www.dinochecker.com/dinosaurs/AORUN›. Web access: 07th Mar 2026.
