Desmatophoca is an extinct genus of early pinniped that lived during the Miocene, and is named from the Greek "phoca", meaning seal. A taxon of the family Desmatophocidae, it shares some morphological similarities with modern true seals. Two species are recognized: Desmatophoca oregonensis and Desmatophoca brachycephala. Little information exists regarding Desmatophoca, due to the small number of fossil samples obtained and identified.
Desmatophoca is an extinct genus of early pinniped that lived during the Miocene, and is named from the Greek "phoca", meaning seal. A taxon of the family Desmatophocidae, it shares some morphological similarities with modern true seals. Two species are recognized: Desmatophoca oregonensis and Desmatophoca brachycephala. Little information exists regarding Desmatophoca, due to the small number of fossil samples obtained and identified.
Unlike modern pinnipeds, Desmatophoca did not survive into the Holocene. There is some scientific debate as to whether any Desmatophoca species may have been present in the Oligocene, but without fossil samples obtained from this era, this is based primarily on conjecture. All samples of fossil Desmatophoca were found in marine deposits in Washington and Oregon, in the USA, which could indicate a geographic range of what is now the Pacific Northwest.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).