Kryostega is a large temnospondyl amphibian from the Early or Middle Triassic of Antarctica. The genus is based on a single specimen collected in 1986 by a team led by paleontologist William H. Hammer of Augustana College, and now housed in the collections of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH 24419).
Kryostega is a large temnospondyl amphibian from the Early or Middle Triassic of Antarctica. The genus is based on a single specimen collected in 1986 by a team led by paleontologist William H. Hammer of Augustana College, and now housed in the collections of the American Museum of Natural History (AMNH 24419).
== Description == left|thumb|Restoration The holotype consists of an incomplete snout, including portions of both the right and left premaxilla, a partial left maxilla, both lacrimals, a small portion of the left nasal, the vomer, and a fragment of the palatine. Many partial teeth are preserved, though most have been broken away at their bases. The preserved part of the skull measures 27 cm long and 21 cm wide, from which a total skull length on about one meter has been inferred (Sidor et al., 2008; p. 657). Total body length has been estimated at 4.57 meters. The specimen suffered some damage during excavation, and the ventral surface is better preserved than the dorsal side of the fossil. Presently, only a single species is recognized, K. colllinsoni, named in honor of Antarctic scientist Jim Collinson.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).