Geranosaurus (meaning "crane reptile") is a genus of heterodontosaurid ornithischian dinosaur from the Early Jurassic. The type and only species is G. atavus.
Geranosaurus (meaning "crane reptile") is a genus of heterodontosaurid ornithischian dinosaur from the Early Jurassic. The type and only species is G. atavus.
==History and naming== During the road-cutting of Barkly Pass in Eastern Cape, South Africa, road engineer George Mandy collected the remains of a small dinosaur, including badly crushed fragments of the skull, partial limb bones, and . These fossils were acquired by the South African Museum and subsequently described in 1911 by South African palaeontologist Robert Broom. Broom found that the fossils represented the earliest known member of Predentata and gave them the name Geranosaurus atavus, though he was uncertain if all the bones were from a single individual and as a result treated the partial skull as the holotype. No etymology for the name was provided, but for the species name the Latin word atavus means "ancestor" referencing its position as an early ornithischian, and of the genus name geranos is Ancient Greek for "crane" in reference to the bird-like limb bones. The holotype bears the collection number SAM-PK-1871, while the poorly preserved partial hindlimb is numbered as SAM-PK-1857. The vertebrae were believed to be too large to be from the same individual as the skull, but are now lost.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).