''Shihtienfenia'' was a

pareiasaurid Pareiasaurs (meaning "cheek lizards") are an extinct clade of large, herbivorous parareptiles. Members of the group were armoured with scutes which covered large areas of the body. They first appeared in southern Pangea during the Middle Permian ...

parareptile Parareptilia ("at the side of reptiles") is a subclass or clade of basal sauropsids (reptiles), typically considered the sister taxon to Eureptilia (the group that likely contains all living reptiles and birds). Parareptiles first arose near the ...

from the

Late Permian 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, ...

China China, officially the People's Republic of China (PRC), is a country in East Asia. It is the world's most populous country, with a population exceeding 1.4 billion, slightly ahead of India. China spans the equivalent of five time zones and ...

Species

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 Baode () is a county in the northwest of Shanxi province, China, bordering Shaanxi province to the west. It is under the administration of Xinzhou city, and is its westernmost county-level division. Baode is known for Jujube Jujube (), ...

Shanxi Shanxi (; ; formerly romanised as Shansi) is a landlocked province of the People's Republic of China and is part of the North China region. The capital and largest city of the province is Taiyuan, while its next most populated prefecture-lev ...

, part of the Sunjiagou Formation. ''Shanshisaurus xuecunensis'' Cheng, 1980 and ''Huanghesaurus liuliensis'' Gao, 1983 are synonyms. ''S. completus'' (Wang, Yi and Liu, 2019); The first pareiasaur skull from Asia came from this species.

Classification

''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.

References

External links

Pareiasaurinae
at Palaeos Pareiasaurs Permian reptiles of Asia Permian China Prehistoric animals of China Fossil taxa described in 1963 Taxa named by Yang Zhongjian Prehistoric reptile genera {{permian-reptile-stub