Abstract
A reptile specimen from the Lystrosaurus Assemblage Zone of the Beaufort Group, lowermost Triassic of South Africa, represents a new procolophonoid parareptile. Sauropareion anoplus gen. et sp. nov. is identified as the sister taxon of Procolophonidae in a phylogenetic analysis of procolophonoids. Stratigraphic calibration of the most parsimonious tree reveals that four of the six procolophonoid lineages originating in the Permian Period extended into the succeeding Triassic Period. This relatively high taxic survivorship (67%) across the Permo-Triassic boundary strongly suggests that procolophonoids were little if at all affected by the mass extinction event that punctuated the end of the Palaeozoic Era (ca. 251 million years ago).
Full Text
The Full Text of this article is available as a PDF (294.4 KB).
Selected References
These references are in PubMed. This may not be the complete list of references from this article.
- Becker L., Poreda R. J., Hunt A. G., Bunch T. E., Rampino M. Impact event at the Permian-Triassic boundary: evidence from extraterrestrial noble gases in fullerenes. Science. 2001 Feb 23;291(5508):1530–1533. doi: 10.1126/science.1057243. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- Campbell I. H., Czamanske G. K., Fedorenko V. A., Hill R. I., Stepanov V. Synchronism of the siberian traps and the permian-triassic boundary. Science. 1992 Dec 11;258(5089):1760–1763. doi: 10.1126/science.258.5089.1760. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]
- doi: 10.1098/rstb.1998.0225. [DOI] [PMC free article] [Google Scholar]
- Stanley S. M., Yang X. A double mass extinction at the end of the paleozoic era. Science. 1994 Nov 25;266(5189):1340–1344. doi: 10.1126/science.266.5189.1340. [DOI] [PubMed] [Google Scholar]