Tapinocaninus (Greek for "humble"- tapino, and "canine"- caninus) is an extinct genus of therapsids in the family Tapinocephalidae, of which it is the most basal member. Only one species is known, Tapinocaninus pamelae (meaning "Pamela's humble canine"). The species is named in honor of Rubidge's mother, Pamela. Fossils have been found dating from the Middle Permian (Wordian age).
Tapinocaninus (Greek for "humble"- tapino, and "canine"- caninus) is an extinct genus of therapsids in the family Tapinocephalidae, of which it is the most basal member. Only one species is known, Tapinocaninus pamelae (meaning "Pamela's humble canine"). The species is named in honor of Rubidge's mother, Pamela. Fossils have been found dating from the Middle Permian (Wordian age).
==Discovery== Tapinocaninus fossils were first found in the Eodicynodon Assemblage Zone of the Karoo deposits, in the Lower Beaufort Beds in Beaufort West. Five specimens are known, four found at Modderdrift farm and one found on Swartgrond farm. A holotype (NMQR 2987) and four paratypes (NMQR 2985, 2986, 3097 and ROZ K95).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).