Proexochokefalos (meaning "big head with big tuberosities") is an extinct genus of machimosaurid teleosauroid from the Middle to Late Jurassic of France and Switzerland. In life, it was a large marine reptile that would have fed on other large animals.
Proexochokefalos (meaning "big head with big tuberosities") is an extinct genus of machimosaurid teleosauroid from the Middle to Late Jurassic of France and Switzerland. In life, it was a large marine reptile that would have fed on other large animals.
==History== thumb|left|P. cf. bouchardi skull The type species, P. heberti, was originally named "Steneosaurus" heberti by Morel de Glasville in 1876 from a roughly 1.1 meter (3.6 foot) long complete skull and mandible (MNHN.F ) found in the Callovian aged Marnes de Dives near Villers-sur-mer in the Calvados department of Normandy, France. The genus Steneosaurus was used as a longtime wastebasket taxon for various teleosauroid specimens and had more than a dozen species. The type species, Steneosaurus rostromajor is undiagnostic, making the genus and species dubious and invalid. Additionally, many species of so called "Steneosaurus" were found to be quite different and unrelated to one another, thus needing new generic names.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).