''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, ...

of China.

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 ''Pareiasaurus'' is an extinct genus of pareiasauromorph reptile from the Permian period. It was a typical member of its family, the pareiasaurids, which take their name from this genus. Fossils have been found in the Beaufort Group. Descri ...

''. ''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 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 Taiy ...

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 The Sunjiagou Formation is a geological formation in Shanxi, China. It is of Lopingian age. The lower and middle parts of the formation consists of intensely bioturbated fine grained sandstones and thinly interbedded mudstones, deposited in a shal ...

. ''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