Asaphestera is an extinct genus of tetrapod described on the basis of fossils from the Carboniferous of the Joggins locality in Nova Scotia, Canada. It was originally described as an undetermined lepospondyl and subsequently classified as a microsaur within the family Tuditanidae. A study published in 2020 found that specimens referred to Asaphestera represented several unrelated species. Steen (1934)'s original species name Asaphestera platyris was retained for a skull which was re-evaluated as the earliest known synapsid. Some authors continue to support a microsaur classification.
Asaphestera is an extinct genus of tetrapod described on the basis of fossils from the Carboniferous of the Joggins locality in Nova Scotia, Canada. It was originally described as an undetermined lepospondyl and subsequently classified as a microsaur within the family Tuditanidae. A study published in 2020 found that specimens referred to Asaphestera represented several unrelated species. Steen (1934)'s original species name Asaphestera platyris was retained for a skull which was re-evaluated as the earliest known synapsid. Some authors continue to support a microsaur classification.
The type species of Asaphestera is Asaphestera platyris, named by Steen (1934) based on three skulls. Carroll & Gaskill (1978) noted that one of the skulls was briefly named as the species "Hylerpeton" intermedium by Dawson (1894), though it is no longer consider related to the genus Hylerpeton. According to Dawson's species name, they renamed Asaphestera platyris to Asaphestera intermedia.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).