Mixodectidae, from Ancient Greek μιξο (mixo) "mixed", and δεκτες (dektes) "biter", is an extinct family of insectivorous placental mammals in the order Dermoptera. The mixodectids originated in the late Cretaceous and survived into the Paleocene in Europe and North America.
Mixodectidae, from Ancient Greek μιξο (mixo) "mixed", and δεκτες (dektes) "biter", is an extinct family of insectivorous placental mammals in the order Dermoptera. The mixodectids originated in the late Cretaceous and survived into the Paleocene in Europe and North America.
== Description == While there is less anatomical evidence for this group than for other archaic placental families (such as apatemyids, pantolestids, leptictids, and palaeoryctids), preserved dental and cranial anatomies give an idea of mixodectid dietary requirements. Their rodent-like dental pattern was similar to that of the multituberculates, with a pair of large, strong, and forward-directed incisors and a row of multi-cusped and low-crowned premolars and molars a specialized dental set-up probably used for crushing and opening hard seeds and nuts.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).