Maximucinus is an extinct genus of thylacinid that lived during the Middle Miocene in what is now Queensland, Australia. It is known only a second upper molar found at the Riversleigh World Heritage Area. It was the largest thylacinid of its time, attaining a body size of 18 kg (40 lbs). The genus is monotypic, containing only one species, Maximucinus muirheadae.
Maximucinus is an extinct genus of thylacinid that lived during the Middle Miocene in what is now Queensland, Australia. It is known only a second upper molar found at the Riversleigh World Heritage Area. It was the largest thylacinid of its time, attaining a body size of 18 kg (40 lbs). The genus is monotypic, containing only one species, Maximucinus muirheadae.
==History and naming== Maximucinus was described as a new genus and species of thylacinid in 2001 by Stephen Wroe. The holotype and only known specimen, catalogued as QM F30331, is an isolated second upper molar. It was collected from the Ringtail site at the Riversleigh World Heritage Area, north-western Queensland. The site has been radiometrically dated to the Middle Miocene, ~14.2-12.9 Ma.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).