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Thecocoelurus was a genus of dinosaur from the early Cretaceous period. It is known only from half of a single cervical vertebra, discovered by the Rev. William Fox on the Isle of Wight during the 19th century and described by Harry Seeley in 1888. Seeley named the fossil Thecospondylus daviesi and referred it to a genus he had named earlier for the incomplete cast of a sacrum. However, in 1923 Friedrich von Huene decided that it should be removed from Thecospondylus and given its own genus, Thecocoelurus. Though long identified as an indeterminate small theropod, Thecocoelurus was reidentified by Darren Naish and colleagues in 2001 as a member of Oviraptorosauria, a group of omnivorous maniraptoran theropods. Numerous detailed similarities are shared by the specimen and the cervical vertebrae of caenagnathid oviraptorosaurs. In 2004 it was claimed that Thecocoelurus might not be an oviraptorosaur, but a member of the therizinosaur lineage instead.
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