Cynarctus is an extinct genus of the Borophaginae subfamily of canids native to North America. The genus was first founded by W. D. Matthew in 1901, based from a pair of lower jaws, Cynarctus saxitilis, found in the Pawnee Creek Beds of Colorado. It lived during the Middle to Late Miocene 16.0—10.3 mya, existing for approximately . Fossils have been uncovered in Colorado, California, Maryland, western Nebraska, and Texas. It was likely an omnivore, and lacked the bone-cracking adaptations found in some later borophagines. Newer findings have proved the genus to be described as a large dog-like
Cynarctus is an extinct genus of the Borophaginae subfamily of canids native to North America. The genus was first founded by W. D. Matthew in 1901, based from a pair of lower jaws, Cynarctus saxitilis, found in the Pawnee Creek Beds of Colorado. It lived during the Middle to Late Miocene 16.0—10.3 mya, existing for approximately . Fossils have been uncovered in Colorado, California, Maryland, western Nebraska, and Texas. It was likely an omnivore, and lacked the bone-cracking adaptations found in some later borophagines. Newer findings have proved the genus to be described as a large dog-like raccoon, a result from combining characteristics from Canidae with Procyonidae.
== Species == thumb|left|C. galushai skull === Cynarctus crucidens === Found by Mr. A. C. Whitford, from the Department of Geology at The University of Nebraska, and collected for the Nebraska Geological Survey in 1913. This species of Cynarctus is represented by a right lower jaw that was located in beds (Lower Pliocene) in Sioux County, Nebraska. Having an almost complete dentition, it was found to have slight differences in the structure of the mouth/jaw area from the species of C. saxatilis. Findings confirmed that the premolars were more reduced, teeth were narrower, canine smaller, and that the jaw was relatively longer and more slender than species C. saxatilis.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).