Valenictus is an extinct genus of Odobenidae from the Pliocene of California.
Valenictus is an extinct genus of Odobenidae from the Pliocene of California.
== Discovery and naming == Valenictus sheperdi was discovered in 2024 from the Purisima Formation in Santa Cruz, California. The fossil was discovered by thirteen-year old, amateur paleontologist Forrest Sheperd, from whom the specific name is derived.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).