Rhynchaeites (Greek for "beak fossil") is an extinct genus of wading bird, a stem-group threshkiornithid, which lived in Europe and North America during the Eocene epoch. The genus contains three species, R. messelensis, R. litoralis and R. mcfaddeni. It is one of the oldest members of the ibis family known from fossil remains.
Rhynchaeites (Greek for "beak fossil") is an extinct genus of wading bird, a stem-group threshkiornithid, which lived in Europe and North America during the Eocene epoch. The genus contains three species, R. messelensis, R. litoralis and R. mcfaddeni. It is one of the oldest members of the ibis family known from fossil remains.
== Taxonomy == left|thumb|Hypothetical life restoration of R. messelensis The type species, R. messelensis, is known from many well-preserved specimens from the famous Lutetian-aged Messel pit of Germany. It was initially thought to represent an early relative of painted-snipes (family Rostratulidae), and was still considered an early charadriiform for nearly a century, but was identified as an early ibis in 1983.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).