Allkaruen (meaning "ancient brain") is a genus of "rhamphorhynchoid" pterosaur from the Early Jurassic Cañadon Asfalto Formation in Argentina. It contains a single species, Allkaruen koi.
Allkaruen (meaning "ancient brain") is a genus of "rhamphorhynchoid" pterosaur from the Early Jurassic Cañadon Asfalto Formation in Argentina. It contains a single species, Allkaruen koi.
== Description == thumb|left|Endocast of the brain As demonstrated by a CT scan, the braincase of Allkaruen exhibits a unique set of traits that are intermediate between more basal pterosaurs such as Rhamphorhynchus and more derived pterodactyloid pterosaurs such as Anhanguera. These traits are the position of the anterior semicircular canal of the inner ear, the relative orientations of the occiput and occipital condyle, the relative positions of the lateral margins of the flocculus and cerebral hemispheres, and the ratio between the length of the brain and the height of the hindbrain. In addition, the relative orientations of the frontal bone and lateral semicircular canal are more similar to Rhamphorhynchus than Anhanguera, while the optic lobes are positioned lower than the forebrain as in pterodactyloids. This unique combination of characters indicates that the anatomy of the braincase in pterodactyloids evolved through mosaic evolution.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).