
Arsinoitherium (Arsinoe II's beast) is an extinct genus of paenungulate mammals belonging to the extinct order Embrithopoda. It is related to elephants, sirenians, and hyraxes. Arsinoitheres were superficially rhinoceros-like herbivores that lived during the Late Eocene and the Early Oligocene of North Africa from 36 to 30 million years ago, in areas of tropical rainforest and at the margin of mangrove swamps. A species described in 2004, A. giganteum, lived in Ethiopia about 27 million years ago.
Arsinoitherium (Arsinoe II's beast) is an extinct genus of paenungulate mammals belonging to the extinct order Embrithopoda. It is related to elephants, sirenians, and hyraxes. Arsinoitheres were superficially rhinoceros-like herbivores that lived during the Late Eocene and the Early Oligocene of North Africa from 36 to 30 million years ago, in areas of tropical rainforest and at the margin of mangrove swamps. A species described in 2004, A. giganteum, lived in Ethiopia about 27 million years ago.
Adults of the species A. zitteli stood around tall at the shoulders and in length. A. zitelli has been estimated to have weighed anywhere from , whereas A. giganteum estimates range from . The most noticeable features of Arsinoitherium were a pair of enormous horns above the nose and a second pair of tiny knob-like horns over the eyes. These were structurally similar to the horns of modern bovids. While reconstructions usually show them as similar to the ossicones of giraffes, in life each bony core may have been covered, like the horn cores of bovids, with a large horn of keratin. Both males and females had horns. While some investigators have described a larger and a smaller species from the same site, others have identified the difference in body and tooth size as sexual dimorphism.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).