Cascocauda (meaning "ancient tail") is an extinct genus of anurognathid pterosaurs from the Late–Middle Jurassic Tiaojishan Formation of Hebei Province, China. The genus contains a single species, C. rong, known from a complete skeleton belonging to a juvenile individual preserved with extensive soft-tissues, including wing membranes and a dense covering of pycnofibres. Some of these pycnofibres appear to be branched, resembling the feathers of maniraptora theropod dinosaurs, suggesting that pterosaur pycnofibres may be closely related to feathers in dinosaurs.
Cascocauda (meaning "ancient tail") is an extinct genus of anurognathid pterosaurs from the Late–Middle Jurassic Tiaojishan Formation of Hebei Province, China. The genus contains a single species, C. rong, known from a complete skeleton belonging to a juvenile individual preserved with extensive soft-tissues, including wing membranes and a dense covering of pycnofibres. Some of these pycnofibres appear to be branched, resembling the feathers of maniraptora theropod dinosaurs, suggesting that pterosaur pycnofibres may be closely related to feathers in dinosaurs.
==Discovery and naming== The type and only specimen, NJU-57003, was discovered in the Tiaojishan Formation of China. The specimen hails from the Mutoudeng locality of the Daohugou bed, located in Qinglong County in Hebei Province, which has been dated to around the Callovian to Oxfordian stages during the Middle to Late Jurassic period. NJU-57003 consists of nearly complete and articulated skeleton with extensive soft-tissues preserved on both a main and counter slab, and is housed in Nanjing University in Nanjing, China. The specimen was first reported as an unnamed anurognathid in December 2018 by Zixiao Yang and colleagues, along with another anurognathid specimen (CAGS-Z070), in a description and analysis of both specimens' integumentary structures. NJU-57003 would not be fully described until 2022 by Yang and colleagues, wherein it was diagnosed as a new genus and species, Cascocauda rong. The generic name is derived from the Latin cascus, meaning 'ancient' or 'primitive', and cauda, meaning 'tail.' The specific name is from the Chinese character 'róng' (绒/絨), derived from the phrase "máo róng róng" (毛绒绒/毛絨絨) which means "a fluffy appearance." Thus, the full binomial name translates as "fluffy ancient tail."
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).