thumb|left|Life reconstruction of Protospinax annectans Protospinax is an extinct genus of cartilaginous fish from the Middle to Late Jurassic of Europe and Russia. The type species, P. annectans, was found in the Solnhofen limestones of southern Bavaria. Formerly known from only two specimens, further museum specimens of P. annectans were discovered at the Museum of Comparative Zoology of Harvard University in the 1990s, having been misidentified as Squatina and Heterodontus. Six more species, all known only from isolated teeth, have been assigned to Protospinax, though only four including th
thumb|left|Life reconstruction of Protospinax annectans Protospinax is an extinct genus of cartilaginous fish from the Middle to Late Jurassic of Europe and Russia. The type species, P. annectans, was found in the Solnhofen limestones of southern Bavaria. Formerly known from only two specimens, further museum specimens of P. annectans were discovered at the Museum of Comparative Zoology of Harvard University in the 1990s, having been misidentified as Squatina and Heterodontus. Six more species, all known only from isolated teeth, have been assigned to Protospinax, though only four including the type species remain valid. It was a relatively small shark, with the largest uncatalogued specimen of P. annectans measuring about long.
Protospinax is a difficult taxon to accommodate in taxonomies. A 2023 study found it to be a squalomorph shark; one analysis placed it closest to angelsharks and sawsharks, but the authors concluded that its exact position within Squalomorphi is ultimately tentative due to a lack of unambiguous supporting traits.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).