Saurosphargis is an extinct genus of a basal marine reptile, saurosphargid, known from the Middle Triassic (Anisian age) of southwestern Poland and eastern Netherlands. It contains a single species, Saurosphargis volzi.
Saurosphargis is an extinct genus of a basal marine reptile, saurosphargid, known from the Middle Triassic (Anisian age) of southwestern Poland and eastern Netherlands. It contains a single species, Saurosphargis volzi.
==Discovery== Saurosphargis is known solely from the unnumbered holotype that was housed at the Breslaw Museum, a partial postcranial skeleton that included a section of 12 incomplete back vertebrae with ribs. The specimen collected at Gogolin, Gorny Slask of Upper Silesia, Poland, from the Chorzower Schichten horizon of the Lower Muschelkalk, dating to the early Anisian stage of the early Middle Triassic, about 246 million years ago. Rieppel (1995) described an isolated vertebra MGU Wr. 3873s housed at Institute of Geological Sciences, University of Wroclaw, that is possibly referable to Saurosphargis, collected from the same general location. The holotype was destroyed during World War II, and as a result many authors considered Saurosphargis to be a nomen dubium prior to the discovery of additional saurosphargid species, that enabled better comparisons with the detailed descriptions and figures of Saurosphargis in Huene (1936).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).