Mesomyzon is an extinct lamprey genus from freshwater strata of the Early Cretaceous (Barremian–Aptian age) Yixian Formation of China. It contains a single species, M. mengae.
Mesomyzon is an extinct lamprey genus from freshwater strata of the Early Cretaceous (Barremian–Aptian age) Yixian Formation of China. It contains a single species, M. mengae.
The animal's exquisitely preserved fossils show a creature very similar to modern-day lampreys, having a well-developed sucking oral disk, a branchial basket, at least seven pairs of gill pouches and corresponding gill arches, impressions of gill filaments, and at least 80 myomeres of its musculature. It had the same three-phase life cycle found in modern lampreys.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).