Archeopelta is an extinct genus of carnivorous archosaur from the late Middle or early Late Triassic period (late Ladinian to early Carnian stage). It was a 2 m (6 ft) long predator which lived in what is now southern Brazil. Its exact phylogenetic placement within Archosauriformes is uncertain; it was originally classified as a doswelliid, but subsequently it was argued to be an erpetosuchid archosaur.
Archeopelta is an extinct genus of carnivorous archosaur from the late Middle or early Late Triassic period (late Ladinian to early Carnian stage). It was a 2 m (6 ft) long predator which lived in what is now southern Brazil. Its exact phylogenetic placement within Archosauriformes is uncertain; it was originally classified as a doswelliid, but subsequently it was argued to be an erpetosuchid archosaur.
== Discovery == It is only known from the holotype CPEZ-239a, which consists of partial skeleton (including vertebrae, partial right front and hind limbs, a partial hip, and an undetermined bone which may be part of a tibia) and braincase. It was found in the Santa Maria 1 Sequence, previously known as the Santa Maria Formation, in Chiniquá region, São Pedro do Sul of Rio Grande do Sul State. It was first named by Julia B. Desojo, Martín D. Ezcurra and César L. Schultz in 2011 and the type species is Archeopelta arborensis. The generic name comes from archaios, ancient in Greek and pelta, shield, in reference to its thick osteoderms. The specific name is derived from arbor, tree in Latin, in reference to Sanga da Árvore where the fossils were found.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).