Talpanas lippa, the Kauaʻi mole duck, is an extinct species of duck. It was first described by Andrew N. Iwaniuk, Storrs L. Olson, and Helen F. James in the journal Zootaxa in November 2009. It is the only known member of the genus Talpanas. It was endemic to the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi where the fossil remains were unearthed in the Makauwahi Cave, Maha‘ulepu. The archaeological association of the bones is about 6000 years BP (around 4050 BCE).
Talpanas lippa, the Kauaʻi mole duck, is an extinct species of duck. It was first described by Andrew N. Iwaniuk, Storrs L. Olson, and Helen F. James in the journal Zootaxa in November 2009. It is the only known member of the genus Talpanas. It was endemic to the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi where the fossil remains were unearthed in the Makauwahi Cave, Maha‘ulepu. The archaeological association of the bones is about 6000 years BP (around 4050 BCE).
==Etymology== The genus name Talpanas is taken from the Latin word talpa, meaning mole and referring to the small size of the eyes, and the Greek word anas, or duck. The species name lippa is from the Latin , meaning "nearly blind".
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).