Pterygotidae (the name deriving from the type genus Pterygotus, meaning "winged one") is a family of eurypterids, an extinct group of aquatic arthropods. They were members of the superfamily Pterygotioidea. Pterygotids were the largest known arthropods to have ever lived with some members of the family, such as Jaekelopterus and Acutiramus, exceeding 2 metres (6.6 ft) in length. Their fossilized remains have been recovered in deposits ranging in age from 428 to 372 million years old (Late Silurian to Late Devonian).
Pterygotidae (the name deriving from the type genus Pterygotus, meaning "winged one") is a family of eurypterids, an extinct group of aquatic arthropods. They were members of the superfamily Pterygotioidea. Pterygotids were the largest known arthropods to have ever lived with some members of the family, such as Jaekelopterus and Acutiramus, exceeding 2 metres (6.6 ft) in length. Their fossilized remains have been recovered in deposits ranging in age from 428 to 372 million years old (Late Silurian to Late Devonian).
One of the most successful groups of eurypterids, the pterygotids were the only eurypterid family to achieve a truly worldwide distribution. Several evolutionary innovations made the pterygotids unique among the eurypterids, with large and flattened telsons (the posteriormost division of the body) likely used as rudders to provide additional agility and enlarged chelicerae (frontal appendages) with claws. These claws were robust and possessed teeth which would have made many members of the group formidable predators. The strange proportions and large size of the pterygotid eurypterids led to the quarrymen who discovered the first fossil remains of the group to give them the common name "Seraphims".
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).