Malawania is an extinct genus of basal thunnosaurian ichthyosaur that lived during the middle Early Cretaceous (Hauterivian or Barremian stage) in what is now Iraq. The type and only known species is M. anachronus, first described in 2013 on the basis of a partial skeleton. It is unusual as it is much more primitive than other Cretaceous ichthyosaurs, being most closely related to Ichthyosaurus from the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic, over 70 million years earlier than Malawania, with all other known ichthyosaurs from the Late Jurassic onwards belonging to the family Ophthalmosauridae.
Malawania is an extinct genus of basal thunnosaurian ichthyosaur that lived during the middle Early Cretaceous (Hauterivian or Barremian stage) in what is now Iraq. The type and only known species is M. anachronus, first described in 2013 on the basis of a partial skeleton. It is unusual as it is much more primitive than other Cretaceous ichthyosaurs, being most closely related to Ichthyosaurus from the Late Triassic and Early Jurassic, over 70 million years earlier than Malawania, with all other known ichthyosaurs from the Late Jurassic onwards belonging to the family Ophthalmosauridae.
== Discovery and naming == The holotype and only known specimen was discovered in 1952 by British petroleum geologists D. M. Morton, F. R. S. Henson, R. J. Wetzel and L. C. F. Damesin while working in Chia Gara, Amadia in Iraqi Kurdistan. The slab was being used to dam a small river and was part of a mule track. It was then transported back to the UK and donated to the Natural History Museum in 1959, since catalogued as NHMUK PV R 6682. Robert M. Appleby would study the specimen for many years until his death in 2004, but never published a paper, one manuscript submitted to Paleontology in 1979 was rejected due to the uncertain provenance of the specimen. The specimen was formally described in 2013 by Fischer and colleagues. Using palynology it was determined that the rocks surrounding the specimen were Hauterivian-Barremian in age, which was unexpected given the archaic nature of the specimen. The large time gap in representation in the fossil record makes the species a Lazarus taxon within its lineage. The name is derived from "Kurdish ‘Malawan’: swimmer and Latinized Greek noun in apposition ‘anachronus’ meaning ‘out of time’." Fereidoun Biglari of the National Museum of Iran collaborated with researchers in the selection of the Kurdish name for Malwania.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).