Megawhaitsia is an extinct genus of large therocephalian therapsids who lived during the Late Permian (Wuchiapingian) in what is now Eastern Europe. The only known species is M. patrichae, described in 2008 from several fossils discovered in various oblasts of European Russia. The fossils are representative of a large animal whose skull size is estimated to be long.
Megawhaitsia is an extinct genus of large therocephalian therapsids who lived during the Late Permian (Wuchiapingian) in what is now Eastern Europe. The only known species is M. patrichae, described in 2008 from several fossils discovered in various oblasts of European Russia. The fossils are representative of a large animal whose skull size is estimated to be long.
The most notable feature of Megawhaitsia is that it has a maxilla with canals directly connected to the tooth root of the canines. Based on the characteristics present in the related genus Euchambersia, Russian paleontologist Mikhail Ivakhnenko raises the possibility that the animal may have had a venom gland. If it is true, then it would then be one of the oldest tetrapods known to have this attribute. Subsequent studies have challenged this proposition.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).