Plinthogomphodon is an extinct genus of traversodontid cynodonts from the Late Triassic of the eastern United States. Fossils have been found from the Deep River basin of North Carolina, part of the larger Newark Supergroup. It is known from a single eroded snout. The type and only species is P. herpetairus.
Plinthogomphodon is an extinct genus of traversodontid cynodonts from the Late Triassic of the eastern United States. Fossils have been found from the Deep River basin of North Carolina, part of the larger Newark Supergroup. It is known from a single eroded snout. The type and only species is P. herpetairus.
== Description and history == Plinthogomphodon was named in 1999. The name means "brick molar tooth" in Greek, as it was found in mudstone used to make bricks and its postcanine teeth resemble molars. The type species is P. herpetairus, meaning "companion of reptiles" from the Greek herpeton ("reptile") and hetairos ("companion"). The name alludes to the close proximity of the holotype specimen to the remains of a rauisuchian (Postosuchus alisonae) and a sphenosuchian archosaur (Dromicosuchus) when it was first discovered. It is thought that the Plinthogomphodon had been previously consumed by the Postosuchus, which died and was buried when pursuing the Dromicosuchus.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).