Omnidens, meaning "all-tooth", is an extinct genus of large Cambrian animal known only from a series of large mouth apparatus and sclerotized talon-like structures, originally mistaken as the mouthparts of anomalocaridids. When first named, it was interpreted as a giant priapulid, but is now considered a panarthropod. Its mouth apparatus closely resembles that of the smaller gilled lobopodian Pambdelurion, indicating it is likely to have been a close relative of that species. With a maximum estimated body length of , Omnidens is suggested to have been the largest known free-living Cambrian org
Omnidens, meaning "all-tooth", is an extinct genus of large Cambrian animal known only from a series of large mouth apparatus and sclerotized talon-like structures, originally mistaken as the mouthparts of anomalocaridids. When first named, it was interpreted as a giant priapulid, but is now considered a panarthropod. Its mouth apparatus closely resembles that of the smaller gilled lobopodian Pambdelurion, indicating it is likely to have been a close relative of that species. With a maximum estimated body length of , Omnidens is suggested to have been the largest known free-living Cambrian organism. Omnidens fossils are found in the Maotianshan Shales in the Yunnan Province of southern China, and are especially abundant from the slightly younger Xiaoshiba Lagerstätte locality.
==History==
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).