Bawitius is an extinct genus of giant polypterid from the Upper Cretaceous (lower Cenomanian) Bahariya Formation of Egypt. The type species is B. bartheli, named as a species of Polypterus in 1984, and the genus etymology comes from Bawiti, the principal settlement of the Bahariya Oasis in Egypt. It is known from the holotype TU-B SFB 69 Vb 003 (= Bah 5/12-016): left ectopterygoid scales and some sparse scales.
via Wikidata · CC0
Bawitius is an extinct genus of giant polypterid from the Upper Cretaceous (lower Cenomanian) Bahariya Formation of Egypt. The type species is B. bartheli, named as a species of Polypterus in 1984, and the genus etymology comes from Bawiti, the principal settlement of the Bahariya Oasis in Egypt. It is known from the holotype TU-B SFB 69 Vb 003 (= Bah 5/12-016): left ectopterygoid scales and some sparse scales.
==Morphology== Compared to modern polypterids, Bawitius was enormous: the Bawitius holotype ectopterygoid is five times larger than the one of Polypterus and the scales are unusually large, too: these remains suggest the living animal may have been up to 300 centimeters (9.8 feet) in length.
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).