Dentaneosuchus is a genus of large bodied sebecid crocodylomorph from the Middle Eocene of Issel and Réalmont (France). Originally described as Atacisaurus crassiproratus, the discovery of additional remains led to it being placed in a separate genus in 2023. It was tentatively recovered as the basalmost member of the family Sebecidae. Because of this Dentaneosuchus could play an important part in deciphering the origins and dispersal of European sebecids, as their presence on the continent, far away from their primary range in South America, is still not entirely resolved. It reached a simila
Dentaneosuchus is a genus of large bodied sebecid crocodylomorph from the Middle Eocene of Issel and Réalmont (France). Originally described as Atacisaurus crassiproratus, the discovery of additional remains led to it being placed in a separate genus in 2023. It was tentatively recovered as the basalmost member of the family Sebecidae. Because of this Dentaneosuchus could play an important part in deciphering the origins and dispersal of European sebecids, as their presence on the continent, far away from their primary range in South America, is still not entirely resolved. It reached a similar size to the enormous Barinasuchus, making it not only one of the biggest sebecids but also the biggest terrestrial carnivore of Cenozoic Europe. Dentaneosuchus would have been an apex predator of its environment, capable of taking large prey such as Lophiodon. However, for as of yet unknown reasons crocodylomorphs would lose their spot as top predator in this part of the world by the end of the Eocene, with Dentaneosuchus representing one of the last members of its group in Europe.
==History and naming== The first fossil of Dentaneosuchus, a mandibular symphysis catalogued as specimen MHNT.PAL.2006.0.53., was discovered in the Sables du Castrais Formation near Issel in southern France and assigned to the genus Atacisaurus by Gaston Astre in 1931, creating the name Atacisaurus crassiproratus. When describing Iberosuchus in 1975, Miguel Telles Antunes considered the possibility that the Issel remains may have belonged to the same animal, tentatively referring the symphysis to his new genus, and Ortega et al. (1996) agreed with this placement.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).