''Euconcordia'' is an

extinct Extinction is the termination of a kind of organism or of a group of kinds (taxon), usually a species. The moment of extinction is generally considered to be the death of the last individual of the species, although the capacity to breed and ...

genus Genus ( plural genera ) is a taxonomic rank used in the biological classification of extant taxon, living and fossil organisms as well as Virus classification#ICTV classification, viruses. In the hierarchy of biological classification, genus com ...

Late Carboniferous Late may refer to: * LATE, an acronym which could stand for: ** Limbic-predominant age-related TDP-43 encephalopathy, a proposed form of dementia ** Local-authority trading enterprise, a New Zealand business law ** Local average treatment effect, ...

captorhinid Captorhinidae (also known as cotylosaurs) is an extinct family of tetrapods, traditionally considered primitive reptiles, known from the late Carboniferous to the Late Permian. They had a cosmopolitan distribution across Pangea. Description Cap ...

known from Greenwood County,

Kansas Kansas () is a state in the Midwestern United States. Its capital is Topeka, and its largest city is Wichita. Kansas is a landlocked state bordered by Nebraska to the north; Missouri to the east; Oklahoma to the south; and Colorado to the ...

of the

United States The United States of America (U.S.A. or USA), commonly known as the United States (U.S. or US) or America, is a country primarily located in North America. It consists of 50 states, a federal district, five major unincorporated territorie ...

Description

''Euconcordia'' is known from the

holotype A holotype is a single physical example (or illustration) of an organism, known to have been used when the species (or lower-ranked taxon) was formally described. It is either the single such physical example (or illustration) or one of several ...

KUVP 8702a&b, well preserved

skull The skull is a bone protective cavity for the brain. The skull is composed of four types of bone i.e., cranial bones, facial bones, ear ossicles and hyoid bone. However two parts are more prominent: the cranium and the mandible. In humans, the ...

in dorsal view along with its counterpart, a partial preserved

braincase In human anatomy, the neurocranium, also known as the braincase, brainpan, or brain-pan is the upper and back part of the skull, which forms a protective case around the brain. In the human skull, the neurocranium includes the calvaria or skul ...

in ventral view, and from the referred specimen KUVP 96/95, well preserved skull in ventral view and a poorly preserved dorsal counterpart. It was collected in the

Hamilton Quarry Hamilton Quarry is a Late Carboniferous lagerstätte near Hamilton, Kansas, United States. It has a diverse assemblage of unusually well-preserved marine, euryhaline, freshwater, flying, and terrestrial fossils (invertebrates, vertebrates, and pla ...

, from the

Calhouns Shale The Calhouns Shale is a geologic formation in Kansas. It preserves fossils A fossil (from Classical Latin , ) is any preserved remains, impression, or trace of any once-living thing from a past geological age. Examples include bones, she ...

Formation of the Shawnee Group, dating to the Virgilian stage (or alternatively late

Kasimovian The Kasimovian is a geochronology, geochronologic age (geology), age or chronostratigraphy, chronostratigraphic stage (stratigraphy), stage in the International Commission on Stratigraphy, ICS geologic timescale. It is the third stage in the Penn ...

to early

Gzhelian The Gzhelian ( ) is an age in the ICS geologic timescale or a stage in the stratigraphic column. It is the youngest stage of the Pennsylvanian, the youngest subsystem of the Carboniferous. The Gzhelian lasted from to Ma. It follows the Kasim ...

stage) of the Late Pennsylvanian Series, about 300

million years ago The abbreviation Myr, "million years", is a unit of a quantity of (i.e. ) years, or 31.556926 teraseconds. Usage Myr (million years) is in common use in fields such as Earth science and cosmology. Myr is also used with Mya (million years ago). ...

. ''Euconcordia'' was originally thought to be the

basalmost In phylogenetics, basal is the direction of the ''base'' (or root) of a rooted phylogenetic tree or cladogram. The term may be more strictly applied only to nodes adjacent to the root, or more loosely applied to nodes regarded as being close to th ...

known member of Captorhinidae. A novel phylogenic study of primitive reptile relationships by Müller & Reisz in 2006 recovered '' Thuringothyris'' as a sister taxon of the Captorhinidae, and therefore, by definition, ''Thuringothyris'' represents the basalmost known captorhinid.Muller, J. and Reisz, R.R. (2006). "The phylogeny of early eureptiles: Comparing parsimony and Bayesian approaches in the investigation of a basal fossil clade." ''Systematic Biology'', 55(3):503-511. The same results were obtained in later phylogenic analyses. ''Euconcordia'' is still the earliest known captorhinid as all other captorhinid taxa are known only from

Permian The Permian ( ) is a geologic period and stratigraphic system which spans 47 million years from the end of the Carboniferous Period million years ago (Mya), to the beginning of the Triassic Period 251.9 Mya. It is the last period of the Paleoz ...

deposits.

Etymology

''Euconcordia'' was first named by Johannes Müller and

Robert R. Reisz Robert Rafael Reisz is a Canadian paleontologist and specialist in the study of early amniote and tetrapod evolution. Research career Reisz received his B.Sc. (1969), M.Sc. (1971) and Ph.D. (1975) from McGill University as Robert L. Carroll ...

2005 File:2005 Events Collage V2.png, From top left, clockwise: Hurricane Katrina in the Gulf of Mexico; the Funeral of Pope John Paul II is held in Vatican City; "Me at the zoo", the first video ever to be uploaded to YouTube; Eris was discovered in ...

. Its original generic name was ''Concordia'' and the

type species In zoological nomenclature, a type species (''species typica'') is the species name with which the name of a genus or subgenus is considered to be permanently taxonomically associated, i.e., the species that contains the biological type specimen ...

is ''Concordia cunninghami''. The original generic name was derived from the

Latin Latin (, or , ) is a classical language belonging to the Italic branch of the Indo-European languages. Latin was originally a dialect spoken in the lower Tiber area (then known as Latium) around present-day Rome, but through the power of the ...

''concordia'', meaning "unity" or "harmony". The

specific name Specific name may refer to: * in Database management systems, a system-assigned name that is unique within a particular database In taxonomy, either of these two meanings, each with its own set of rules: * Specific name (botany), the two-part (bino ...

honors Christopher R. Cunningham for studying this taxon as part of his PhD thesis on the Hamilton Quarry. The original generic name turned out to be

preoccupied The Botanical and Zoological Codes of nomenclature treat the concept of synonymy differently. * In botanical nomenclature, a synonym is a scientific name that applies to a taxon that (now) goes by a different scientific name. For example, Linn ...

by extant hippolytid

crustacea Crustaceans (Crustacea, ) form a large, diverse arthropod taxon which includes such animals as decapods, seed shrimp, branchiopods, fish lice, krill, remipedes, isopods, barnacles, copepods, amphipods and mantis shrimp. The crustacean gro ...

n ''Concordia'' Kingsley, 1880 (currently considered a

junior synonym The Botanical and Zoological Codes of nomenclature treat the concept of synonymy differently. * In botanical nomenclature, a synonym is a scientific name that applies to a taxon that (now) goes by a different scientific name. For example, Linna ...

of '' Latreutes'' Stimpson, 1860). Reisz, Haridy & Müller (2016) coined a replacement name ''Euconcordia''.

References

• Carboniferous reptiles of North America Greenwood County, Kansas Fossil taxa described in 2016 Captorhinids Prehistoric reptile genera Paleontology in Kansas {{carboniferous-animal-stub