Iharkutosuchus ("Iharkút crocodile", after where it was found) is an extinct genus of basal eusuchian crocodyliform. Its fossils have been found in the Santonian-aged (Late Cretaceous) Csehbánya Formation in the Bakony Mountains of western Hungary.
Iharkutosuchus ("Iharkút crocodile", after where it was found) is an extinct genus of basal eusuchian crocodyliform. Its fossils have been found in the Santonian-aged (Late Cretaceous) Csehbánya Formation in the Bakony Mountains of western Hungary.
==Description== left|thumb|Hypothetical size comparison of Iharkutosuchus to a cat, with silhouette and osteoderms based on [[Pietraroiasuchus]] Iharkutosuchus is based on MTM 2006.52.1, a nearly complete skull, but several other partial skulls, isolated skull bones, and numerous teeth are also known. It was a small crocodyliform, with a skull length up to , and estimated body length of . Its skull was low, and the snout was short. Iharkutosuchus is unusual in its heterodonty: some of its teeth were complex and multicusped, like mammal teeth. The structure of the skull indicates that it could grind food with a mobile lower jaw, an inference corroborated by the extensive horizontal wear facets on its teeth, and together with the teeth suggest a diet of fibrous plant material. The enamel structure of Iharkutosuchus was convergent with mammalian Hunter-Schreger bands, suggesting a similar evolutionary pressure caused it to develop traits for efficient mastication.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).