Wangwusaurus - Misplaced Pages

Extinct genus of dubious therapsids

Wangwusaurus Temporal range: Late Permian 255 Ma PreꞒ Ꞓ O S D C P T J K Pg N ↓
Scientific classification
Domain:	Eukaryota
Kingdom:	Animalia
Phylum:	Chordata
Clade:	Synapsida
Clade:	Therapsida
Clade:	†Gorgonopsia (?)
Genus:	†Wangwusaurus Zhongjian, 1979 in paleontology
Species:	†W. tayuensis
Binomial name
†Wangwusaurus tayuensis Zhongjian, 1979

Wangwusaurus is extinct genus of probable therapsid that lived in the Late Permian in present-day China. Only species is known, Wangwusaurus tayuensis, described by the paleontologist Yang Zhongjian in 1979 from seventeen teeth found in the Jiyuan formation, of which at least seven are recognized as not belonging to those of therapsids.

Description

One of the teeth found also has characteristics similar to those of gorgonopsians, which earned the chinese paleontologist Yang Zhongjian to classify him as the first member of this group to have lived outside of Russia and Africa, places where they are officially recognized. However, three years later, in 1981, palaeontologists Denise Sigogneau-Russell and Ai-Lin Sun found the assigned material to be a random assemblage of which only two have even a remote similarity to gorgonopsians, making its classification uncertain.

References

^ Young, C. C. (1979). "A Late Permian fauna from Jiyuan, Henan". Vertebrata PalAsiatica. 17 (2): 99–113.
Kammerer, C. F.; Masyutin, V. (2018). "Gorgonopsian therapsids (Nochnitsa gen. nov. and Viatkogorgon) from the Permian Kotelnich locality of Russia". PeerJ. 6: e4954. doi:10.7717/peerj.4954. PMC 5995105. PMID 29900078.
Sigogneau-Russell, D.; Sun, A.-L. (1981). "A brief review of Chinese synapsids". Geobios. 14 (2): 276. Bibcode:1981Geobi..14..275S. doi:10.1016/S0016-6995(81)80012-5.

Liu, Jun; Xu, Li; Jia, Song-Hai; Pu, Han-Yong; Liu, Xiao-Ling (2014). "The Jiyuan tetrapod fauna of the Upper Permian of China—2. stratigraphy, taxonomical review, and correlation". Vertebrata PalAsiatica. 52 (3): 328–339.
The main groups of non-mammalian synapsids at Mikko's Phylogeny Archive

Gorgonopsia