Dracoraptor (meaning "dragon thief") is a genus of coelophysoid dinosaur that lived during the Hettangian stage of the Early Jurassic Period of what is now Wales dated at 201.3 ± 0.2 million years old.

[1][2] The fossil was first discovered in 2014 by Rob and Nick Hanigan and Sam Davies at the Blue Lias Formation on the South Wales coast.

In March 2014, brothers and amateur palaeontologists Nick and Rob Hanigan, while searching for ichthyosaur remains at Lavernock Point, a large cape south of Cardiff, found stone plates containing dinosaur fossils which had fallen off the 7-metre (23 ft) high cliff face.

Judith Adams and Philip Manning of the University of Manchester took X-ray pictures and CAT-scans of the fossils.

The remains were donated to Amgueddfa Cymru – Museum Wales, and prepared by Craig Chivers and Gary Blackwell.

In 2015, student Sam Davies found additional rock plates at the dig site which contained foot bones assigned to Dracoraptor.

[3] The type species, Dracoraptor hanigani, was named and described in 2016 by British palaeontologists David Martill, Steven Vidovic, Cindy Howells, and John Nudds.

The holotype, NMW 2015.5G.1–2015.5G.11, was discovered in the lower Bull Cliff Member of the Blue Lias Formation in the United Kingdom.

More precisely, it came from a layer just metres below the first occurrence of Jurassic ammonite Psiloceras and above the Paper Shales that represent the lithological Triassic-Jurassic boundary, precisely dating the dinosaur to the earliest Hettangian stage, 201.3 million years ago ± 0.2 million years.

[3] The neck vertebrae are elongated, opisthocoelous, i.e. with a vertebral body that is convex in front and concave at the rear, and crowned by low neural spines.

At the front side the vertebral body is pierced by a pleurocoel, a depression with a pneumatic opening for the air sac to enter the inside of the vertebra.

Furculae have only rarely been recovered from early theropod fossils; other examples include those of Segisaurus and Coelophysis.

[3] A cladistic analysis in 2016 determined that Dracoraptor was a basal member, positioned low in the evolutionary tree, of the Neotheropoda.

A membership of the clade Neotheropoda is proven by the shallow depression around the antorbital fenestra, the forward position of a pleurocoel on the neck vertebrae and the presence of an obturator notch in the ischium.

[6] In the early Jurassic, South Wales was a coastal area with several small islands in a warm shallow sea.