Apatodon is a dubious genus of dinosaur. When Marsh named it, he thought it was a jaw with a tooth from a Mesozoic pig, but it was soon shown that the specimen was an eroded vertebra, from a dinosaur possibly from the Morrison Formation of Garden Park, Colorado. Marsh had misidentified the neural spine as the tooth of a pig-like animal (Baur, 1890). The name was derived from Greek: απατη ("trick", "deceit") and οδους (genitive οδοντος) ("tooth", in reference to its original, incorrect identification).