Acaenasuchus (from the Greek akaina, meaning "thorn" and suchus, meaning "crocodile") is an extinct genus of pseudosuchian, endemic to what would be presently be known as Arizona during the Late Triassic, specifically during the Carnian and Norian stages of the Triassic. Acaenasuchus had a stratigraphic range of approximately . Acaenasuchus is further categorized as one of the type fauna that belong to the Adamanian LVF, based on the fauna of the Blue Mesa Member of the Chinle Petrified Forest Formation of Arizona, where Acaenasuchus was initially discovered.
Acaenasuchus (from the Greek akaina, meaning "thorn" and suchus, meaning "crocodile") is an extinct genus of pseudosuchian, endemic to what would be presently be known as Arizona during the Late Triassic, specifically during the Carnian and Norian stages of the Triassic. Acaenasuchus had a stratigraphic range of approximately . Acaenasuchus is further categorized as one of the type fauna that belong to the Adamanian LVF, based on the fauna of the Blue Mesa Member of the Chinle Petrified Forest Formation of Arizona, where Acaenasuchus was initially discovered.
==Discovery and naming== The holotype, UCMP 139576 (a left dorsal paramedian scute), was first discovered by Charles Lewis Camp in 1930. Camp initially named the species "Machaeroprosopus zuni". By 1985, "Machaeroprosopus zuni" was considered a synonym of Desmatosuchus, and was reclassified as a juvenile Desmatosuchus by Robert A. Long and Karen Ballew in 1985. UCMP 139576 was eventually moved into its own taxon and classified under the name Acaenasuchus, upon reclassification by Robert A. Long and Philip A. Murry in 1995. The species epithet Acaenasuchus geoffreyi was named after Geoffrey Long, Robert A. Long's son, for his "considerable patience while his father was away in the field". Long and Murry are credited for providing the most stable evidence that Acaenasuchus was an independent taxon. Long and Murry identified small dorsal plates along the carapace of Acaenasuchus, and identified what they described to be"ornithischian-like" teeth, in addition to a multitude of other proposed synapomorphies. Some of which are the subjects of active studies regarding Acaenasuchus characterization.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).