Veratalpa ("true mole") is an extinct genus of placental mammals of uncertain affinities, that lived in France from the early to middle Miocene. It is a monotypic genus with only one species, Veratalpa lugdunensiana, known from a single fossil of ankle bone.
Veratalpa ("true mole") is an extinct genus of placental mammals of uncertain affinities, that lived in France from the early to middle Miocene. It is a monotypic genus with only one species, Veratalpa lugdunensiana, known from a single fossil of ankle bone.
==Taxonomy== In a 1905, the Argentine naturalist Florentino Ameghino described Veratalpa in an overview of the ankle boned from the early to middle Miocene of Vieux Collonges in France. He listed several species of the family Talpidae (moles and related species) from Vieux Collonges, including "species C", which he named as a new genus and species, Veratalpa lugdunensiana, in a footnote. In a 1906 review of Ameghino's paper, Édouard Louis Trouessart affirmed that Veratalpa probably represented a new genus of mole, but noted that the specific name lugdunensiana would have been more correctly written "lugdunensis". According to Trouessart, the suffix -ana is appropriate for names that reference persons, but not for those that refer to places, such as this name, which is derived from Lugdunum (the Latin name for Lyon).
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).