| Paronychodon Temporal range: Late Cretaceous, 125–65.5 Ma |
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| Scientific classification | |
| Kingdom: | Animalia |
| Phylum: | Chordata |
| Class: | Reptilia |
| Superorder: | Dinosauria |
| Suborder: | Theropoda |
| Infraorder: | Deinonychosauria? |
| Genus: | Paronychodon Cope, 1876 |
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Paronychodon (meaning "beside claw tooth") was a theropod dinosaur genus. It is a tooth taxon, considered dubious because of the fragmentary nature of the fossils, which include "buckets" of teeth but no other remains. Teeth of the Paronychodon type have been reported from a wide variety of times and places, including the 65.5 million year old end-Cretaceous Lance Formation of Wyoming and the early Cretaceous Una Formation of Spain, dating to the late Barremian age 125 million years ago.
The type species, discovered by Edward Drinker Cope in 1876, is Paronychodon lacustris, from the Judith River Formation of Montana, dating to 75 million years ago, during the Campanian age.
The teeth assigned to Paronychodon are all small, and may have come from various juvenile deinonychosaurs. Paronychodon was originally described as being similar to Zapsalis, another tooth taxon often considered synonymous with Richardoestesia (a possible dromaeosaurid). It was later considered to be everything from a coelurid, an ornithomimosaur, a dromaeosaurid, an archaeopterygid, and a troodontid, though it could also be another kind of coelurosaurian theropod. While most researchers have therefore considered it simply indeterminate theropod teeth, a small consensus has found them to be deinonychosaurs. One study showed that the tooth enamel is identical to that found in Byronosaurus, a troodontid.[1]