Leptosuchus (from Ancient Greek λεπτός (leptós), meaning "thin", and Σοῦχος (Soûkhos), meaning "Sobek") is an extinct genus of leptosuchomorph parasuchid phytosaurs with a complex taxonomical history. Fossils have been found from the Dockum Group and lower Chinle Formation outcropping in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, United States, and date back to the Carnian stage of the Late Triassic.
Leptosuchus (from Ancient Greek λεπτός (leptós), meaning "thin", and Σοῦχος (Soûkhos), meaning "Sobek") is an extinct genus of leptosuchomorph parasuchid phytosaurs with a complex taxonomical history. Fossils have been found from the Dockum Group and lower Chinle Formation outcropping in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona, United States, and date back to the Carnian stage of the Late Triassic.
Currently there are believed to be four species of Leptosuchus. All species share in common a similar position of the temporal arch below the skull roof and a posterior process of the squamosal that extends farther than the paroccipital process. The type species is L. crosbiensis, which was named in 1922 on the basis of material found from Texas. L. adamanensis was first described in 1930 as a species of Machaeroprosopus from the Blue Mesa Member of Petrified Forest National Park, along with the other two species, L. lithodendrorum and L. gregorii. It was not until the publication of a 1995 paper on tetrapods of southwestern United States that these species were recognized as belonging to the genus Leptosuchus. However, because of the distinctive size of the rostral crest in L. gregorii, it was assigned to its own genus, Smilosuchus, in that same paper. Despite this, L. gregorii has recently been seen as belonging to Leptosuchus, as it is believed that the large, complete crest was independently developed in this particular species.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).