Achaenodon is an extinct artiodactyl mammal belonging to the family Helohyidae. It lived in the mid-late Eocene (about 43-39 million years ago) and its fossil remains have been found in North America.
Achaenodon is an extinct artiodactyl mammal belonging to the family Helohyidae. It lived in the mid-late Eocene (about 43-39 million years ago) and its fossil remains have been found in North America.
==Description== Achaenodon was around the size of a pig or a black bear, with a body mass of around . The skull had a relatively short muzzle and large sideways (laterally) expanded zygomatic arches, making the skull nearly as wide as it is long. There was a very high sagittal crest, which connected later to an expanded nuchal crest; these two structures, together with the large cheekbone arches, indicate that the musculature of the jaws was extremely powerful. The teeth of Achenodon were bunodont and quite large in size. The dental formula was the primitive (ancestral) condition of artiodactyls with three incisors, a canine, four premolars and three molars; the first lower premolar was present in juveniles but were absent in adults. The upper molars had greatly thickened enamel. The limbs were short, with the forelimbs being slightly shorter than the hindlimbs, with the manus having four digits.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).