''Purlovia'' is an extinct genus of herbivorous

therocephalia Therocephalia is an extinct clade of therapsids (mammals and their close extinct relatives) from the Permian and Triassic periods. The therocephalians ("beast-heads") are named after their large skulls, which, along with the structure of their te ...

n therapsids from the

Late Permian Late or LATE may refer to: Everyday usage * Tardy, or late, not being on time * Late (or the late) may refer to a person who is dead Music * ''Late'' (The 77s album), 2000 * Late (Alvin Batiste album), 1993 * Late!, a pseudonym used by Dave Groh ...

Russia Russia, or the Russian Federation, is a country spanning Eastern Europe and North Asia. It is the list of countries and dependencies by area, largest country in the world, and extends across Time in Russia, eleven time zones, sharing Borders ...

. Fossils have been found from the

Tonshayevsky District Tonshayevsky District () is an administrative district (raion), one of the forty in Nizhny Novgorod Oblast, Russia.Order #3-od Municipally, it is incorporated as Tonshayevsky Municipal District.Resolution #670 It is located in the northeast of th ...

Nizhny Novgorod Oblast Nizhny Novgorod Oblast () is a federal subjects of Russia, federal subject of Russia (an oblast). Its administrative center is the types of inhabited localities in Russia, city of Nizhny Novgorod. It has a population of 3,119,115 as of the 2021 Ru ...

. The

type species In International_Code_of_Zoological_Nomenclature, 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 spe ...

of ''Purlovia'', ''P. maxima'', was named in 2011. In comparison to other therocephalians, ''Purlovia'' had a very wide skull due to a widened temporal region. Viewed from above, it looks roughly triangular. The skull is about long, with nearly half its length in the postorbital region behind the eye sockets. It has large

canine teeth In mammalian oral anatomy, the canine teeth, also called cuspids, dogteeth, eye teeth, vampire teeth, or fangs, are the relatively long, pointed teeth. In the context of the upper jaw, they are also known as '' fangs''. They can appear more fl ...

and smaller buccal, or cheek teeth, along the thick upper and lower jaws. The lower jaw is robust and curved upward, with a well-developed symphyseal region where the two halves of the jaw meet.

Classification

Although it and the South African '' Nanictidops'' were considered closely related and classified as the only two members of Nanictidopidae by Ivakhnenko 2011 as they shared a wide temporal region, Liu and Abdala 2020 found little relation between the two genera and instead classifies ''Nanictidops'' as 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 ...

member of

Baurioidea Baurioidea is a superfamily of therocephalian therapsids. It includes advanced therocephalians such as ''Regisaurus'' and ''Bauria''. The superfamily was named by South African paleontologist Robert Broom in 1911. Bauriamorpha, named by D. M. ...

, while ''Purlovia'' forms an exclusively

Laurasian Laurasia () was the more northern of two large landmasses that formed part of the Pangaea supercontinent from around ( Mya), the other being Gondwana. It separated from Gondwana (beginning in the late Triassic period) during the breakup of Pan ...

clade with '' Caodeyao'' from China instead. Major consensus tree of Therocephalia relationships

References

Extinct animals of Russia Fossil taxa described in 2011 Eutherocephalia Lopingian synapsids of Europe Therocephalia genera {{Paleo-Therapsid-stub