Megalictis (meaning "great weasel") is an extinct genus of large predatory mustelids that existed in North America during the "cat gap" from the Late Arikareean (Ar4) in the Miocene epoch. It is thought to have resembled a huge, jaguar-sized ferret, weighing up to .
Megalictis (meaning "great weasel") is an extinct genus of large predatory mustelids that existed in North America during the "cat gap" from the Late Arikareean (Ar4) in the Miocene epoch. It is thought to have resembled a huge, jaguar-sized ferret, weighing up to .
==History of discovery== left|thumb|M. frazieri jaw, Florida Museum of Natural History The genus Megalictis was first described by W. D. Matthew in 1907, and assigned to the family Mustelidae. Two similar genera discovered at the same time, Aelurocyon (Peterson, 1907) and Paroligobunis (Peterson, 1910) were identified as synonymous with Megalictis in 1996 though Paroligobunis was re-established as a separate genus in 1998. P. R. Bjork, in 1970, assigned the genus to the subfamily Mellivorinae, whilst J. A. Baskin reassigned it to Oligobuninae in 1998. Three species have been identified in the genus: M. ferox, M. petersoni, and M. frazieri, whilst two more, Megalictis brevifacies and Megalictis simplicidens, have since been determined to be synonymous with M. ferox. Other synonyms of M. ferox include Aelurocyon brevifacies, Brachypsalis simplicidens and Paroligobunis simplicidens.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).