The dinosaur genus Alvarezsaurus and the family Alvarezsauridae are named in his honor.
Everything has since been lumped into Alvarezsauridae, with Mononykinae surviving as a subfamily.
It is a member of the family Alvarezsauridae, small coelurosaurian dinosaurs which are characterized by short but powerful forelimbs specialized for digging.
They argued that the family Alvarezsauridae was actually a group of Mesozoic flightless birds on the basis of several features that were supposedly unique to birds.
Alvarezsauroidea, Alvarezsauridae, and Alvarezsauria are named for the historian Don Gregorio Alvarez, not the more familiar physicist morphology, especially in their hand morphology.
As the more primitive members of the Alvarezsauridae were better characterized, the monophyly of the clade was strongly supported, but the more primitive members lacked the most birdlike traits.
Indeed, in the fossil of its relative " Shuvuuia " feather traces were discovered, proving that Alvarezsauridae were among the theropod lineages with feathery or downy integument.
Because he had redefined Ornithomimosauria in a much narrower sense, a new term was made necessary within his preferred terminology to denote the clade containing the sistergroups Ornithomimosauria and Alvarezsauridae previously the latter had been contained within the former.
Powell originally assigned " Unquillosaurus " to the Carnosauria, Novas and Agnolin in 2004 concluded from the opisthopubic pelvic anatomy that " Unquillosaurus " was part of the Maniraptora or at least Maniraptoriformes, and likely closely related to either the Avialae or the bird-like Alvarezsauridae; perhaps it was itself a bird, a basal member of the Metornithes.