Heptasuchus is an extinct genus of loricatan pseudosuchian known from the Middle or Late Triassic upper Chugwater Group of Wyoming, United States. It contains a single species, Heptasuchus clarki, the first formally recognized "rauisuchian" or loricatan pseudosuchian from North America.
Heptasuchus is an extinct genus of loricatan pseudosuchian known from the Middle or Late Triassic upper Chugwater Group of Wyoming, United States. It contains a single species, Heptasuchus clarki, the first formally recognized "rauisuchian" or loricatan pseudosuchian from North America.
==Discovery and history== thumb|left|The Clark locality in Wyoming, where fossils of Heptasuchus have been discovered. Collected in the summer of 1977 at the newly discovered Clark locality northwest of Casper Wyoming, the specimens assigned to H. clarki were described in a brief article and two master's theses at Wayne State University, Detroit. Heptasuchus was first formally described and named by Robert M. Dawley, John M. Zawiskie and J. W. Cosgriff in 1979 and the type species is Heptasuchus clarki. The generic name is derived from epta (ἑπτά), "seven" in Ancient Greek, and suchus (συχος) which is the Latinised form of the Ancient Greek word for the crocodile god of ancient Egypt. The specific name honors George Clark of Casper for discovering the type locality of Heptasuchus. UW 11562, a partial skull and associated postcranial skeleton was designed as the holotype and UW 11563 through UW 11565, representing partial cranial and postcranial remains not associated with the holotype were designed as paratypes. Little research followed the initial report, although Heptasuchus has been listed in various publications summarizing fossils of Wyoming and the Triassic. Thought to be lost until 1997, most of the specimens now reside at the University of Wyoming, although some elements are still unaccounted for.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).