Paleoparadoxia ("ancient paradox") is a genus of large, herbivorous aquatic mammals that inhabited the northern Pacific coastal region during the Miocene epoch (). It ranged from the waters of Japan (Tsuyama and Yanagawa), to Alaska in the north, and down to Baja California, Mexico.
Paleoparadoxia ("ancient paradox") is a genus of large, herbivorous aquatic mammals that inhabited the northern Pacific coastal region during the Miocene epoch (). It ranged from the waters of Japan (Tsuyama and Yanagawa), to Alaska in the north, and down to Baja California, Mexico.
==Description== Paleoparadoxia is thought to have fed primarily on seaweeds and sea grasses. The jaws and the angle of the teeth resemble a backhoe bucket. Its bulky body was well adapted for swimming and underwater foraging. Originally interpreted as amphibious, Paleoparadoxia is now thought to have been a fully marine mammal like their possible relatives, the sirenians, spending most of their lives walking across the sea bottom like marine hippos. Studies on its habitat preference show that it favoured deep, offshore waters.
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Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).