Eudromaeosauria

Eudromaeosauria is the group of "true" dromaeosaurids, the ground-living theropod predators that flourished across the Cretaceous. It is a node-based clade anchored on Dromaeosaurus, Velociraptor, Deinonychus, and Saurornitholestes (Turner and colleagues, 2012), and it excludes the small, often piscivorous or flight-capable branches of the family such as the microraptorines and the Gondwanan unenlagiines. Its fossils are known almost exclusively from the Northern Hemisphere, a distribution taken to mean the group arose after Pangaea split into Laurasia and Gondwana, leaving it unable to colonize the southern continents. Eudromaeosaurs are conventionally divided into three subfamilies, Dromaeosaurinae, Velociraptorinae, and Saurornitholestinae, though the boundaries between them and the placement of individual genera remain contested. Compared with their smaller relatives, they were generally larger-bodied hypercarnivores that hunted prey of comparable or greater size, and they are set apart by distinctive features of the foot, including a shortened metatarsus and an enlarged, blade-like sickle claw held clear of the ground.