In 1858,
Richard Owen received fragmentary dinosaur leg bones discovered by James Harrison in
Charmouth,
Dorset. These included a right knee joint—comprising the articulated distal end of the
femur and a proximal third of the
tibia and
fibula—and a partial left femur. He used them as part of the type material of the thyreophoran
Scelidosaurus when describing it in 1859. Subsequent studies reconsidered their classification, suggesting early theropod affinities within the Saurischia, rather than an early thyreophoran within the Ornithischia. The
informal name "
Merosaurus newmani" was coined by
Samuel Paul Welles, H. P. Powell, and Stephan Pickering in 1995 in an unpublished manuscript for the theropod material. Carrano and Sampson (2004) proposed that the articulated knee joint likely belonged to a basal, indeterminate tetanuran theropod.
Darren Naish and
David Martill (2007) also assigned these specimens to the Tetanurae. In 2010, Roger Benson suggested that the bones could be attributed to the
Coelophysoidea, while ultimately concluding that both specimens were indeterminate theropods. In 2024,
Dornraptor normani was formally
described as a new genus and species of averostran theropod by Matthew G. Baron. He established
NHMUK (BMNH) 39496, the right knee joint, as the
holotype specimen. The partial fibula originally described by Owen as belonging to this specimen has since been lost.
GSM 109560, the left femur, was also referred to the genus. The
generic name,
Dornraptor, combines "Dorn", an abbreviated form of the
Anglo-Saxon Dornwaraceaster—referring to the English region of Dorset—with the
Latin word "raptor", meaning "robber" or "thief", which is frequently used in the names of small and medium-sized theropods. The
specific name,
normani, honours British palaeontologist
David B. Norman. == Description ==