Enhydrocyon is an extinct genus of bone crushing canid which inhabited North America during the Oligocene and Early Miocene, 30.8—20.4 Ma, existing for approximately .
Enhydrocyon is an extinct genus of bone crushing canid which inhabited North America during the Oligocene and Early Miocene, 30.8—20.4 Ma, existing for approximately .
Enhydrocyon dentition suggests this animal was a hypercarnivore or mesocarnivore. Species of Enhydrocyon were relatively large, powerfully built carnivores with a short snout and deep jaws reminiscent of a jaguar. These features give the skull a shape resembling that of the extant sea otter (Enhydra), prompting the scientific name. With an estimated weight of about , this was the earliest genus of canid adapted to be specialized predators.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).