Lestodon is an extinct genus of giant ground sloth native to South America during the Pleistocene epoch. Its fossil remains have primarily been found in the Pampas and adjacent regions. The largest member of the family Mylodontidae, It is estimated to have weighed . It was a herbivore and primarily fed on the grasses and low-growing plants.
Lestodon is an extinct genus of giant ground sloth native to South America during the Pleistocene epoch. Its fossil remains have primarily been found in the Pampas and adjacent regions. The largest member of the family Mylodontidae, It is estimated to have weighed . It was a herbivore and primarily fed on the grasses and low-growing plants.
== Research history and taxonomy == The genus Lestodon and the species Lestodon armatus was erected by Paul Gervais in 1855, based on a fragments of the upper and lower jaws with teeth found in Late Pleistocene deposits what is currently Buenos Aires Province, Argentina. The genus name, which means "thief tooth", is in reference to the large caniniform teeth at the front of the jaw. In 1934, a second species L. australis was erected by Lucas Kraglievich, but this is now regarded as a junior synonym of L. armatus. In 2004, two additional species L. urumaquensis and L. codorensis were described based on fossils found in Late Miocene/Early Pliocene aged deposits in Venezuela. However other authors have doubted the placement of these taxa in Lestodon, with later studies generally placing them in the separate genus Bolivartherium.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).