Vintana sertichi is an early gondwanatherian mammal dating from the Late Cretaceous, approximately 66 million years ago. Scientists found the lone fossil, a skull, on Madagascar's west coast in the Maastrichtian Maevarano Formation.
Vintana sertichi is an early gondwanatherian mammal dating from the Late Cretaceous, approximately 66 million years ago. Scientists found the lone fossil, a skull, on Madagascar's west coast in the Maastrichtian Maevarano Formation.
Vintana is extremely relevant to the understanding of gondwanatheres because it is the first well-preserved skull, as opposed to previous fragments and teeth. Establishing a connection with multituberculates and haramiyidans in the theriiform clade Allotheria, it is a rather unusual animal, either closely associated with the archosaurs or Euarchontoglires and Laurasiatheria, possessing massive lateral flanges in its skull whose exact purpose is poorly understood, as well as massive olfactory bulbs. A rather large animal at a weight of , Vintana also represents another example of a considerably large Mesozoic mammal alongside Adalatherium, another gondwanathere from same formation, this body mass is only exceeded by Repenomamus and Patagomaia.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).