Anaschisma ("ripped up") is an extinct genus of large temnospondyls. These animals were part of the family called Metoposauridae, which filled the crocodile-like predatory niches in the late Triassic. It had a large skull about long, and possibly reached long. It was an ambush hunter, snapping up anything small enough to fit in its huge jaws. It was very common during the Late Triassic (Carnian-Norian age) in what is now the American Southwest.
Anaschisma ("ripped up") is an extinct genus of large temnospondyls. These animals were part of the family called Metoposauridae, which filled the crocodile-like predatory niches in the late Triassic. It had a large skull about long, and possibly reached long. It was an ambush hunter, snapping up anything small enough to fit in its huge jaws. It was very common during the Late Triassic (Carnian-Norian age) in what is now the American Southwest.
==History of discovery== Anaschisma was erected by Branson (1905) from two metoposaurid skulls from the Popo Agie Formation (Carnian) of Wyoming. The generic name Anaschisma ("ripped up") was not explained but would derive from Ancient Greek ἀνασχίζω [anaskhizo] "rip up, rend", likely alluding to the fragmented state of the original fossils noted by Branson: "The skulls were in a hard matrix of arenaceous shale, and had been broken in many pieces." The type species, A. browni, was coined for the skull UC 447, while a second nominal species, A. brachygnatha, was erected for the skull UC 448. Moodie (1908) considered A. brachygnatha a junior synonym of A. browni, although Branson and Mehl (1929) retained the two species as distinct. Colbert and Imbrie (1956) synonymized Anaschisma with the Newark Supergroup genus Eupelor but retained it as a valid Eupelor species endemic to the Popo Aggie Formation. Chowdhury (1965) synonymized Anaschisma with Metoposaurus and sunk all North American metoposaurids from the Chinle and Dockum into browni.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).