Shihtienfenia Temporal range: Changhsingian, | |
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Fossils on display at the Paleozoological Museum of China | |
Scientific classification ![]() | |
Domain: | Eukaryota |
Kingdom: | Animalia |
Phylum: | Chordata |
Clade: | † Parareptilia |
Order: | † Procolophonomorpha |
Clade: | † Pareiasauria |
Family: | † Pareiasauridae |
Genus: | † Shihtienfenia Young & Yeh, 1963 |
Type species | |
†Shihtienfenia permica Young & Yeh, 1963 | |
Species | |
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Synonyms [1] | |
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Shihtienfenia is an extinct genus of pareiasaurid parareptile from the Late Permian of China. [1]
Lee (1997) refers to S. xuecunensis as a metaspecies lacking the autapomorphies of Shihtienfenia. Tsuji & Müller (2009) seem to consider it a valid taxon for cladistic analysis, and like Lee 1997 place the two Chinese species close to Pareiasuchus .
S. permica (Young and Yeh, 1963); The skull of this pareiasaur is unknown. It is known originally from a number of isolated vertebrae, jaws, and limb-bones and an incomplete skeleton, all from the Shiqianfeng locality near Baode, Shanxi, part of the Sunjiagou Formation. Shanshisaurus xuecunensis Cheng, 1980 and Huanghesaurus liuliensis Gao, 1983 are synonyms. [3]
S. completus (Wang, Yi and Liu, 2019); The first pareiasaur skull from Asia came from this species.
Shihtienfenia is unusual because of the presence of 6, rather than the usual 4, sacral vertebrae, and may belong in a separate subfamily, although Oskar Kuhn includes it under the Pareiasaurines in his monograph (Kuhn 1969). As with the Pareiasaurines the upper margin of the ilium is flat.