Aphaurosuchus is an extinct genus of baurusuchid mesoeucrocodylian known from the Late Cretaceous Bauru Basin of São Paulo, southern Brazil. It contains two species, Aphaurosuchus escharafacies and Aphaurosuchus kaiju.
Aphaurosuchus is an extinct genus of baurusuchid mesoeucrocodylian known from the Late Cretaceous Bauru Basin of São Paulo, southern Brazil. It contains two species, Aphaurosuchus escharafacies and Aphaurosuchus kaiju.
==Discovery and naming== In 2012, the Laboratório de Paleontologia lead an expedition to the municipality of Jales, São Paulo State, excavating at the Fazenda Furnas site which had yielded baurusuchid remains during previous digs. This site, belonging to the Adamantina Formation/Vale do Rio do Peixe Formation, contained a nearly complete baurusuchid skeleton, specimen LPRP/USP 0697, broken into six main blocks. The first block contains the skull, all cervical vertebrae with associated osteoderms as well as the first four thoracic vertebrae, both scapulae and articulated coracoids. The second block is made up of most of the postcranial skeletal from the 8th thoracic to the 9th caudal vertebra with the associated double row of parasagittal osteoderms, the posterior thoracic ribs, gastralia, right forelimb, pelvic girdle and most of the hindlimbs. The humerus was originally preserved, however lost during the excavations. The left manus and left pes are preserved in individual blocks and two segments of caudal vertebrae have also been preserved as blocks. The placement in relation to one another is however unclear due to poor preservation of the anterior vertebrae of the more distally located caudal block. Two isolated caudals with osteoderms have also been discovered as well as rib fragments of uncertain placement.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).