Tsaidamotherium is an extinct genus of Late Miocene ovibovinid caprine from the Tibetan Plateau of Northwestern China. Both known species are extremely unusual in that the horns are of unequal sizes: the left horn core is several times smaller than the right horn core. Although it is originally considered that it belongs to the tribe Ovibovini, close to the muskox, Ovibos moschatus, a study in 2022 posits Tsaidamotherium as a giraffoidean genus in the family Prolibytheriidae together with Prolibytherium and Discokeryx.
Tsaidamotherium is an extinct genus of Late Miocene ovibovinid caprine from the Tibetan Plateau of Northwestern China. Both known species are extremely unusual in that the horns are of unequal sizes: the left horn core is several times smaller than the right horn core. Although it is originally considered that it belongs to the tribe Ovibovini, close to the muskox, Ovibos moschatus, a study in 2022 posits Tsaidamotherium as a giraffoidean genus in the family Prolibytheriidae together with Prolibytherium and Discokeryx.
==Etymology== The generic name refers to the Qaidam Basin, the region where the holotype of the type species, T. hedini was found. The specific name "hedini" honors Dr Sven Hedin. The specific name "brevirostrum" refers to the short muzzle of T. brevirostrums holotype skull.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).