Ozraptor

Ozraptor ("Australian thief") is an abelisauroid theropod dinosaur from the Middle Jurassic (Bajocian) Colalura Sandstone of Australia.

In 1967 a group of four twelve-year-old Scotch College schoolboys found a fossil at the Bringo Railway Cutting site near Geraldton, which they showed to Professor Rex Prider of the University of Western Australia. He had a cast made that he sent to experts of the British Museum of Natural History in London who thought it likely belonged to an extinct turtle. Re-evaluation of the bone in the nineties after being prepared out of the rock by John Albert Long and Ralph Molnar showed that it actually was the shinbone of some sort of theropod.

In 1998 Long and Molnar named and described the type (and only) species Ozraptor subotaii. The generic name is derived from "Ozzies", the nickname for Australians, and a Latin raptor, "seizer". The specific name honours a fictional character, the swift-running thief and archer "Subotai" from the movie Conan the Barbarian.

The holotype, UWA 82469, was found from layers of the Colalura Sandstone Formation, dating to the middle Bajocian, about 170 million years old. It consists of the distal or lower end of a left tibia. Together with Rhoetosaurus, Ozraptor belongs to the oldest known Australian dinosaurs.