Cucumericrus ("cucumber-leg") is an extinct genus of stem-arthropod. The type and only species is Cucumericrus decoratus, with fossils discovered from the Maotianshan Shales of Yunnan, China.
Cucumericrus ("cucumber-leg") is an extinct genus of stem-arthropod. The type and only species is Cucumericrus decoratus, with fossils discovered from the Maotianshan Shales of Yunnan, China.
== Description == Cucumericrus is known from a few poorly preserved specimens. Only fragments of trunk cuticle and corresponding appendages had been revealed, while features, such as head structures, which are important to determining its taxonomy, are unknown. The trunk cuticle possess irregular wrinkles and may had been soft in life. Each of the trunk appendage compose of a dorsal flap-like element and a ventral stubby leg with unknown distal region, structurally comparable to the trunk appendages of gilled lobopodians (dorsal flaps and ventral lobopods) and euarthropod biramous appendages (flap-like exopod and limb-like endopod). Anterior margin of the flap lined with ray-like structures, similar to the body flaps of some radiodonts. The legs have been interpreted as somewhere between annulated lobopod legs and segmented arthropod legs.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).