Aorun (pronunciationⓘ) (敖闰 pinyin Áo rùn) is a genus of carnivorous theropod dinosaur first discovered in 2006, with its scientific description published in 2013.

[1] It is possibly one of the oldest known coelurosaurian dinosaurs and is estimated to have lived ~161.6 million years ago during the Late Jurassic Period, though some researchers consider it to be a carnosaurian instead.

[2] The fossil which included the skull with numerous teeth, some vertebrae and leg bones were discovered by James Clark, the Ronald B. Weintraub Professor of Biology, in the Department of Biological Sciences of GW's Columbian College of Arts and Sciences with his then doctoral student Jonah Choiniere, along with a team of international researchers in a remote region of Xinjiang in China in 2006.

[3] The type species Aorun zhaoi was named and described in 2013 by Jonah Choiniere, James Clark, Catherine Forster, Mark Norell, David Eberth, Gregory Erickson, Chu Hongjun and Xu Xing.

[1][4] The specific name honours Professor Zhao Xijin, who led several important vertebrate paleontological expeditions to the Junggar Basin.

[1] Choiniere et al. (2013) noted that based on a histological analysis of its femur and tibia and other characteristics of the holotype, this specimen of Aorun is at most one year old, and is clearly not a perinate.

The shinbone has on its front outer side only a high narrow groove functioning as contact with the upper part of the astragalus.

It has a shorter premaxillary body, but with a larger maxillary fenestra, a rodlike jugal, closely spaced fine serrations on the distal tooth carinae of the maxilla and dentary.

The specimen was collected by IVPP-GWU Field Expedition in 2006, in terrestrial red-brown siltstone that was shown by radiometric dating to have been deposited approximately 161.6 million years ago,[12] at the boundary of the Oxfordian/Callovian stages of the Jurassic period.

This rich paleofauna also included pterosaurs like Sericipterus, ornithischians like Jiangjunosaurus and Yinlong and the sauropods Bellusaurus, Klamelisaurus, Tienshanosaurus and Mamenchisaurus.