Tropidostoma is a medium-sized herbivorous oudenodontid dicynodont therapsid that lived during the Late Permian (Lopingian) period in South Africa. The first Tropidostoma fossil was described by Harry Govier Seeley in 1889. Later two subspecies were identified. Tropidostoma fossils are an index fossil in a biozone of the Karoo Basin known as the Tropidostoma Assemblage Zone. This biozone is characterized by the presence of this species in association with another dicynodont species, Endothiodon uniseries.
Tropidostoma is a medium-sized herbivorous oudenodontid dicynodont therapsid that lived during the Late Permian (Lopingian) period in South Africa. The first Tropidostoma fossil was described by Harry Govier Seeley in 1889. Later two subspecies were identified. Tropidostoma fossils are an index fossil in a biozone of the Karoo Basin known as the Tropidostoma Assemblage Zone. This biozone is characterized by the presence of this species in association with another dicynodont species, Endothiodon uniseries.
==History of discovery== The first Tropidostoma fossil material was found during a field expedition in the Upper Permian-aged Teekloof Formation of the Beaufort Group. This material was later described by Seeley (1889) in a study in which he described two fossils which had been named Dicynodon microtrema and Tropidostoma dunni. In 1915, several years after Seeley's death, the paleontologist, Robert Broom, reexamined the same material and discovered that the fossil material in question was of the same species. This new single species was renamed Tropidostoma microtrema. Some years later, the name T. microtrema was changed to Tropidostoma dubium, and Tropidostoma dunni is now considered to be the type species.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).