Cryptosaurus (meaning "hidden lizard") is a dubious genus of dinosaur known from a partial femur from the Late Jurassic of England. The sole species is Cryptosaurus eumerus.
Cryptosaurus (meaning "hidden lizard") is a dubious genus of dinosaur known from a partial femur from the Late Jurassic of England. The sole species is Cryptosaurus eumerus.
The femur was found by the geologist Lucas Ewbank and donated by him to the Woodwardian Museum at Cambridge in 1869. Cryptosaurus was the same year named by British paleontologist Harry Seeley; the type species is Cryptosaurus eumerus. The genus name is derived from Greek kryptos, "hidden", a reference to the rarity of the find. The specific name means "well-formed thigh" in Greek, a reference to the stout build of the bone. The description of 1869, part of a catalogue of the Cambridge University collection, was rather minimal, consisting of the single sentence "On Shelf g is temporarily placed the femur of a Dinosaur from the Oxford Clay, Cryptosaurus eumerus". From this it is sometimes concluded that the name remained a nomen nudum until a full description by Seeley in 1875.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).