Iniopteryx ("Nape Wing") is an extinct genus of cartilaginous fish known from the Pennsylvanian sub-period of the Carboniferous period. Fossils of Iniopteryx are known from the U.S. states of Nebraska and Indiana.
Iniopteryx ("Nape Wing") is an extinct genus of cartilaginous fish known from the Pennsylvanian sub-period of the Carboniferous period. Fossils of Iniopteryx are known from the U.S. states of Nebraska and Indiana.
==Discovery and naming== Iniopteryx was described in 1973 by paleontologists Rainer Zangerl and Gerard Case as the type species of the family Iniopterygidae within the order Iniopterygiformes (then termed Iniopterygia). The genus is based on multiple well-preserved and articulated fossils from the Stark Shale and Wea Shale of Nebraska, and the Excello Shale and Logan Quarry Shale of Indiana. It is known from the Pennsylvanian subperiod of the Carboniferous period. The holotype of I. rushlaui is the specimen FMNH PF6678, which is an articulated, nearly complete skeleton. The holotype of I. tedwhitei, FMNH PF7241, is also an articulated specimen, although the rear portion of the body is fragmentary. Fossils of Iniopteryx rushlaui are noted to be significantly more common that I. tedwhitei in the original description of both genera. Many specimens of I. rushlaui were studied using radiographic imaging, although it was not possible to study specimens from locales in Nebraska using radiography due to the composition of the rock matrix.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).