Paul states that: Many theropods have been united into new groups... but the placement of "Archaeopteryx" and the sickle-clawed dromaeosaurs in the same family is by far the most radical–yet it is also one of the most necessary... how alike, in detail after detail, dromaeosaurs and "Archaeopteryx" were. However, the name Deinonychosauria was coined by Ned Colbert and Dale Russell in 1969, and defined as a clade (all theropods closer to dromaeosaurids than to birds) by Jacques Gauthier in 1986. Through the early 2000s, consensus among paleontologists was that dromaeosaurids were most closely related to the troodontids, and together with the troodontids, with deinonychosaurians in turn the sister taxon to avialans, and therefore the closest relatives of avialan birds. In 2012, Turner "et al." conducted a phylogenetic analysis (using a dataset of 474 characters scored for 111 taxa) which found Deinonychosauria to be monophyletic. However, several more recent studies have cast doubt on the hypothesis that dromaeosaurids and troodontids were more closely related to each other than either was to birds. A more robust 2013 study by Godefroit et al. (using a dataset of 1,500 characters scored for 358 taxa) found that troodontids were possibly more closely related to birds than to dromaeosaurids; forcing troodontids to remain in a monophyletic Deinonychosauria required four extra steps in the analysis, making this result less likely but not implausible. Because Deinonychosauria was originally defined as all animals closer to dromaeosaurids than to birds without specific reference to troodontids, Deinonychosauria is a synonym of Dromaeosauridae if Troodontidae is closer to birds. In 2019 with the description of the Late Jurassic genus "Hesperornithoides", Hartman et al., using every named Mesozoic maniraptoromorph (with the addition of 28 unnamed specimens), which they scored 700 characters and 501 operational taxonomic units, found that most of the anchiornithids are members of Archaeopterygidae, Halszkaraptorinae and Unenlagiinae are in a redefine family Unenlagiidae, and a Dromaeosauridae "sensu stricto" is the sister taxon of Troodontidae.