Palaeosaniwa is an extinct genus of carnivorous lizard from the Late Cretaceous of North America. The type (and only) species, Palaeosaniwa canadensis, given by Charles Whitney Gilmore in 1928, means "ancient Saniwa from Canada".
Palaeosaniwa is an extinct genus of carnivorous lizard from the Late Cretaceous of North America. The type (and only) species, Palaeosaniwa canadensis, given by Charles Whitney Gilmore in 1928, means "ancient Saniwa from Canada".
== Description == Palaeosaniwa is among the largest terrestrial lizards known from the Mesozoic era, with an estimated body mass of and a snout–vent length about . Its total body length would have been around , smaller than the adult Komodo dragon and other Mesozoic lizards of East Asia (Asprosaurus and Chianghsia). Some specimens attributed to cf. P. canadensis is estimated to have skull length up to which is comparable to a young specimen of komodo dragon around long. It is similar to modern varanid lizards (particularly the Komodo dragon) in having bladelike teeth with minute serrations. These teeth would have been effective for seizing and cutting large prey items, and suggest that Palaeosaniwa fed on other vertebrates. Adult Palaeosaniwa would have been large enough to prey on any of the avialans or mammals known from the time, small non-avian dinosaurs, and the eggs and juveniles of large dinosaurs.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).