Auroroborealia is a small bodied euichthyosaurian ichthyosaur discovered on the New Siberian Islands in the Russian Arctic. The animal was likely similar in size to Hudsonelpidia, around 1 to 1.5 meters in length. Although the fragmentary nature doesn't allow to determine its exact ontogenetic state, other remains from the area suggest that it was simply a small-bodied taxon. It contains a single species, Auroroborealia incognita.
Auroroborealia is a small bodied euichthyosaurian ichthyosaur discovered on the New Siberian Islands in the Russian Arctic. The animal was likely similar in size to Hudsonelpidia, around 1 to 1.5 meters in length. Although the fragmentary nature doesn't allow to determine its exact ontogenetic state, other remains from the area suggest that it was simply a small-bodied taxon. It contains a single species, Auroroborealia incognita.
==Discovery and naming== The fossils of Auroroborealia were discovered by a joint expedition of the Geological Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences and the Trofimuk Institute of Petroleum Geology and Geophysics, Siberian Branch of the Russian Academy of Sciences, during excavations in 2006 and 2009. These expeditions yielded a variety of ichthyosaurian remains from six stratigraphic levels ranging from the lower Carnian to middle Norian. Although most specimens were fragmentary, Zverkov et al. (2021) could nevertheless differentiate between a host of different ichthyosaurs. One fossil in particular, specimen ZIN PH 5/250, included cranial remains as well as anterior presacral vertebrae with associated neural arches and ribs. A bone fragment associated with the pectoral girdle is also part of this specimen. Based on this material Zverkov et al. erected the species Aurororborealia incognita, while also describing a series of referred specimens (which however did not factor into the diagnosis of the genus).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).