Colobops is a genus of reptile from the Late Triassic of Connecticut. Only known from a tiny skull (estimated total length of 2.8 centimeters or 1.1 inches long), this reptile has been interpreted to possess skull attachments for very strong jaw muscles. This may have given it a very strong bite, despite its small size. However, under some interpretations of the CT scan data, Colobops's bite force may not have been unusual compared to other reptiles. The generic name, Colobops, is a combination of (), meaning shortened, and (), meaning face. This translation, "shortened face", refers to its sh
Colobops is a genus of reptile from the Late Triassic of Connecticut. Only known from a tiny skull (estimated total length of 2.8 centimeters or 1.1 inches long), this reptile has been interpreted to possess skull attachments for very strong jaw muscles. This may have given it a very strong bite, despite its small size. However, under some interpretations of the CT scan data, Colobops's bite force may not have been unusual compared to other reptiles. The generic name, Colobops, is a combination of (), meaning shortened, and (), meaning face. This translation, "shortened face", refers to its short and triangular skull. Colobops is known from a single species, Colobops noviportensis. The specific name, noviportensis, is a latinization of New Haven, the name of both the geological setting of its discovery (the New Haven Arkose) as well as a nearby large city. The phylogenetic relations of Colobops are controversial. Its skull shares many features with those of the group Rhynchosauria, herbivorous archosauromorphs distantly related to crocodilians and dinosaurs. However, many of these features also resemble the skulls of the group Rhynchocephalia, an ancient order of reptiles including the modern tuatara, Sphenodon. Although rhynchosaurs and rhynchocephalians are not closely related and have many differences in the skeleton as a whole, their skulls are remarkably similar. As Colobops is only known from a skull, it is not certain which one of these groups it belonged to. Pritchard et al. (2018) interpreted it as a basal rhynchosaur, while Scheyer et al. (2020) reinterpreted it as a rhynchocephalian.
== History == The holotype skull of Colobops, YPM VPPU 18835, is mostly complete, although flattened and missing tooth-bearing portions of the cranial bones. The specimen was discovered in 1965 during highway construction in central Connecticut between the towns of Middletown and Meriden. This locale is part of the New Haven Arkose, a subdivision of the Newark supergroup. The Newark supergroup is a collection of Late Triassic formations along the eastern coast of North America, and the New Haven Arkose has specifically been Uranium-Lead dated to the mid Norian age, about 214.0 to 209.8 million years ago.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).