Sclerothorax is an extinct genus of temnospondyl from the Early Triassic of Germany. It is distinguished from other temnospondyls by its short and very wide skull and the elongated neural spines that form a ridge along its back. Sclerothorax is a basal member of Capitosauria, a large clade of temnospondyls that lived throughout the Triassic.
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Sclerothorax is an extinct genus of temnospondyl from the Early Triassic of Germany. It is distinguished from other temnospondyls by its short and very wide skull and the elongated neural spines that form a ridge along its back. Sclerothorax is a basal member of Capitosauria, a large clade of temnospondyls that lived throughout the Triassic.
==Description== thumb|left|Restoration Among the most unusual features of Sclerothorax are its elongated neural spines. The neural spines are tallest at the front of the spine. Sclerothorax also has a very large pectoral girdle; the interclavicle bone is longer than the skull, meaning that Sclerothorax has the proportionally largest interclavicle of any temnospondyl. The body of Sclerothorax is covered by small scale-like bony ossicles that would have been embedded in the dermis in life. The skull of Sclerothorax is short, wide, and roughly rectangular in shape. The snout is wider than the cheek region. The bones along the midline of the skull roof are also very wide relative to those of other temnospondyls.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).