Gallardosaurus is a genus of pliosaurid plesiosaur from the Caribbean seaway. It contains the single species Gallardosaurus iturraldei. Gallardosaurus was found in middle-late Oxfordian-age (Late Jurassic) rocks of the Jagua Formation of western Cuba. Gallardosaurus is believed to be evolutionarily connected to Peloneustes, a pliosaurid commonly found in the Oxfordian-aged sediment.
Gallardosaurus is a genus of pliosaurid plesiosaur from the Caribbean seaway. It contains the single species Gallardosaurus iturraldei. Gallardosaurus was found in middle-late Oxfordian-age (Late Jurassic) rocks of the Jagua Formation of western Cuba. Gallardosaurus is believed to be evolutionarily connected to Peloneustes, a pliosaurid commonly found in the Oxfordian-aged sediment.
== History and etymology == Oxfordian-age reptiles have been found in Cuba since the first half of the 20th century, but most have not received wide recognition because publications were not widely disseminated. In 1996, Dr. Manuel Iturralde-Vinent and Mark Norell initially mentioned specimen MNHNCu P3005, a partial skull and mandible with a few cervical vertebrae, as resembling that of the species Pliosaurus ferox. The specimen had been discovered in 1946 by Cuban farmer Juan Gallardo about east of Viñales, Pinar del Río, northwestern Cuba. However, it was not prepared when Iturralde-Vinent and Norell saw it and a full description was not made. After preparation, Zulma Gasparini and Iturralde-Vinent assigned the specimen to the genus Peloneustes in 2006, but it was later determined that the specimen was that of a new genus. In 2009, MNHNCu P3005 was described as a separate genus, Gallardosaurus.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).