Anachlysictis gracilis is an extinct carnivorous mammal belonging to the group Sparassodonta, which were metatherians (a group including marsupials and their close relatives) that inhabited South America during the Cenozoic. Anachlysictis is the first record of such borhyaenoids in northern South America, and also the most primitive known member of the family Thylacosmilidae, a group of predators equipped with "saber teeth". It was also the only confirmed record of a thylacosmilid that did not belong to the genus Thylacosmilus until the official publication of Patagosmilus in 2010.
Anachlysictis gracilis is an extinct carnivorous mammal belonging to the group Sparassodonta, which were metatherians (a group including marsupials and their close relatives) that inhabited South America during the Cenozoic. Anachlysictis is the first record of such borhyaenoids in northern South America, and also the most primitive known member of the family Thylacosmilidae, a group of predators equipped with "saber teeth". It was also the only confirmed record of a thylacosmilid that did not belong to the genus Thylacosmilus until the official publication of Patagosmilus in 2010.
This species was found in the Villavieja Formation in the area of La Venta in Colombia, a famous fossil deposit in the Middle Miocene (Laventan; 13.8–11.8 million years ago), based on fragments that include a front portion of the lower jaw, with an incipient molar tooth and a piece of carnassial from the front of the maxilla.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).