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Abstract
Captorhinids, a clade of Paleozoic reptiles, are represented by a rich fossil record that extends from the Late Carboniferous into the Late Permian. Representatives of this clade dispersed from the equatorial regions of Laurasia into the temperate regions of Pangea during the Middle and Late Permian. This rich fossil record shows that there was an evolutionary trend from faunivorous to omnivorous and herbivorous feeding habits within this clade. The discovery of well-preserved captorhinid materials in the Middle Permian of China allows us to determine that the new taxon,Gansurhinus qingtoushanensis, gen. et sp. nov, is a member of Moradisaurinae, a clade of captorhinids with multiple tooth rows arranged in parallel. The presence of this moradisaurine in the Middle Permian of south central Asia leads us to suggest that paleogeographic changes during the Permian, with part of what is today China becoming a large peninsula of Pangea, allowed these early reptiles as well as other terrestrial vertebrates to extend their geographic ranges to this region of the Late Paleozoic supercontinent.
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Acknowledgments
We thank Nicola Wong Ken for illustrations of the specimens and assistance with figures. Research was supported by the Chinese Academy of Sciences (KZCX2-YW-BR-07) for Jun Liu, NSERC (Canada) for Reisz, and Deutsche Forschungsmeinschaft for Johannes Müller for DFG. We also thank Sean Modesto for discussions.
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Department of Biology, University of Toronto Mississauga, 3359 Mississauga Rd. N., Mississauga, Ontario, Canada, L5L 1C6
Robert R. Reisz
Key Laboratory of Evolutionary Systematics of Vertebrates, Institute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, P.O. Box 643, Beijing, 100044, People’s Republic of China
Jun Liu & Jin-Ling Li
Museum für Naturkunde, Leibniz-Institut für Evolutions- und Biodiversitätsforschung an der Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Invalidenstr. 43, 10115, Berlin, Germany
Johannes Müller
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Correspondence toRobert R. Reisz.
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Reisz, R.R., Liu, J., Li, JL.et al. A new captorhinid reptile,Gansurhinus qingtoushanensis, gen. et sp. nov., from the Permian of China.Naturwissenschaften98, 435–441 (2011). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00114-011-0793-0
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