Odontocyclops

Odontocyclops (Greek: “tooth” Greek: “round eye”, a kind of Greek mythological giant with one eye in the midline; "toothy cyclops") is an extinct genus of Dicynodonts that lived in the Late Permian. Dicynodonts are believed to be the first major assemblage of terrestrial herbivores. Fossils of Odontocyclops have been found in the Karoo Basin of South Africa and the Luangwa Valley of Zambia. The phylogenetic classification of Odontocyclops has been long under debate, but most current research places them as their own genus of Dicynodonts and being very closely related to Rhachiocephalus and Oudenodon.

== Discovery and classification == The first skull of what would later be named, Odontocyclops, was discovered in 1913 by Rev. J.H White in the Karoo Basin of South Africa. In 1938, additional Odontocyclops specimens were discovered in the Luangwa Valley of Zambia. Using these specimens and a few later collected skulls Cruickshank and Keyser in their 1979 paper erected a new genus of Dicynodonts to accommodate Odontocyclops. However, Culver and King did not believe that the diagnostic features listed by Cruickshank and Keyser (1979) distinguished Odontocyclops from the genus Dicynodon. This later lead King to classify Odontocylops, not as its own genus, but as a synonym for Dicynodon. However, the most current research by Angielczyk has used cladistic data and provided the most current suggested hypothesis that Odontocyclops represents its own genus of Dicynodont and is very closely related to Rhachiocephalus and Oudenodon.