Pamparaptor (/ˈpɑːmpəræptər/, meaning "thief of the Pampas") is an extinct genus of paravian theropod dinosaur from the Late Cretaceous Portezuelo Formation of the Neuquén province in Argentine Patagonia.

[2] The type and only specimen of Pamparaptor was discovered in 2005 by a technician named Diego Rosales who was working for the Lake Barreales Paleontological Center (or CePaLB) at the National University of Comahue.

[2] It was found at a locality called the "Baal Quarry", which is an outcrop of the Portezuelo Formation dated to the late Turonian or early Coniacian.

[3] Pamparaptor was finally described as a new genus in a publication of the Annals of the Brazilian Academy of Sciences in 2010 by a team of researchers including Juan Porfiri, Jorge Calvo, and Domenica Dos Santos.

The authors remarked in the paper that their description is brief, but explained that they are confident that the remains cannot belong to any pre-existing taxon known from the Portezuelo Formation.

However, Porfiri and colleagues suggest that these similarities are only superficial,[2] and they argue, based on a comparative analysis of dromaeosaurids and troodontids undertaken by Dale Russell and Zhi-Ming Dong in 1993,[5] that several characters place Pamparaptor firmly as a dromaeosaur.

However, they do suggest that the discovery of aberrant taxa like Pamparaptor provide clues for the existence of an endemic lineage of dromaeosaurs distinct from the unenlagiines.

[2] In 2018, Federico A. Gianechini, Peter J. Makovicky, Sebastián Apesteguía, and Ignacio Cerda published an osteological description of all remains referred to the genus Buitreraptor.

In this paper, they conducted a phylogenetic analysis using 152 maniraptoran taxa coded for 853 characters[7] based on the data set of Steve Brusatte and colleagues (2014).

They elected to remove Pamparaptor, along with the problematic genera Kinnareemimus and Pyroraptor, from their final analysis, which resolved the consensus tree considerably.

[7] In 2020, Michael Pittman and Xu Xing published a review of pennaraptoran systematics in which they suggest that Pamparaptor has affinities with the unenlagiines, but they do not make any further remarks on its classification, and it is not included in any of the trees they present.

[1] The Portezuelo Formation is primarily composed of yellow and red-brown mudstones and siltstones which alternate with claystones and indicate the region contained an alluvial fan.