Microtuban is an extinct genus of azhdarchoid pterosaur known from the Late Cretaceous of northern Lebanon.
Microtuban is an extinct genus of azhdarchoid pterosaur known from the Late Cretaceous of northern Lebanon.
==Discovery== Microtuban is known only from a partially preserved skeleton lacking the skull, holotype SMNK PAL 6595. It was acquired from a local fossil dealer by the Staatliches Museum für Naturkunde Karlsruhe and was, as can be deduced from the qualities of the stone matrix, collected in the locality of Hjoûla in a marine layer of the Sannine Formation, dating to the early Cenomanian stage of the Late Cretaceous, about 99.6–96 million years ago. The fossil dealer however, indicated it came from a quarry at nearby Hâqel. Regardless, it is only the second pterosaur fossil found in Lebanon and a rare example of a pterosaur from the African continental plate, to which the area in Cretaceous times belonged. In this period the site was located hundreds of miles from the mainland coastline.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).