A new reptile from the lower Permian of Brazil (Karutia fortunata gen. et sp. nov.) and the interrelationships of Parareptilia

Abstract

A new parareptile from the Cisuralian Pedra de Fogo Formation of north-eastern Brazil is described. Karutia fortunata gen. et sp. nov. is the first Gondwanan member of Acleistorhinidae, a clade previously known only from North America but thought to be closely related to the Russian Lanthanosuchidae. A re-examination of parareptile phylogeny indicates that lanthanosuchids are not closely related to acleistorhinids. These results are more congruent both stratigraphically and biogeographically than the previous ‘lanthanosuchoid’ position for acleistorhinids, as they eliminate a 15 Ma ghost lineage within parareptiles, leaving Acleistorhinidae as an exclusively Pennsylvanian/Cisuralian clade from western Pangaea. Karutia fortunata contributes to our knowledge of the early Permian diversity of Parareptilia in Gondwana, a clade previously represented only by the mesosaurid inhabitants of the Irati-Whitehill epicontinental sea in the southern portion of the supercontinent. The new parareptile joins captorhinids in the amniote record of the Pedra de Fogo Formation, improving our picture of the inland tetrapod fauna of the southern hemisphere during the Cisuralian.

http://zoobank.org/urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:79D59764-4DA0-4C28-B4D3-C517BBF64D81

Keywords:

• Reptilia
• Parareptilia
• Acleistorhinidae
• Gondwana
• Cisuralian
• Pedra de Fogo Formation
• Parnaíba Basin

Acknowledgements

We thank Flavia de Castro Alves (Universidade de Brasília) for Timbira linguistic assistance and Santiago Bessone (CENPAT-Conicet) for his careful preparation of the specimen. Mayor Osvaldo Bonfim and the city of Nazária provided field support, and Conceição Lage offered generous accommodation in Palmeirais. Valeri Golubev and Valeri Bulanov at the Paleontological Institute in Moscow provided access to specimens, and William Simpson (Field Museum of Natural History) photographed the holotype of Acleistorhinus pteroticus. Katia Piovesan (Universidade Federal do Pernambuco) provided photographs used in Figure 3. We thank Yara Haridy for information on Delorhynchus cifellii material from Richards Spur. The manuscript benefited from helpful comments by H.-D. Sues, an anonymous reviewer, and the editors of JSP. Financial support for this research was provided by grants from the Conselho Nacional para a Ciência e Tecnologia (CNPq 305688/2016-2; to JCC), the National Geographic Committee for Research and Exploration (9601-14; to KDA); the Universidad de Buenos Aires Ciencia y Técnica (UBACyT 20020170100643; to CAM); the Negaunee Foundation (to KDA); The Grainger Foundation (to KDA), the Field Museum of Natural History (to KDA); and the Sofja Kovalevskaja Award of the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation (to JF). This is CAM’s contribution R-358 to the Instituto de Estudios Andinos Don Pablo Groeber.

Supplementary material

Supplementary material for this article can be accessed here: https://doi.org/10.1080/14772019.2020.1863487.

Nomenclatural Statement

The electronic version of this article in Portable Document Format (PDF) will represent a published work according to the International Commission on Zoological Nomenclature (ICZN), and hence the new names contained in the electronic version are effectively published under that Code from the electronic edition alone. This published work and the nomenclatural acts it contains have been registered in ZooBank, the online registration system for the ICZN. The ZooBank LSIDs (Life Science Identifiers) can be resolved and the associated information viewed through any standard web browser by appending the LSID to the prefix http://zoobank.org/. The LSID for this publication is: [urn:lsid:zoobank.org:pub:79D59764-4DA0-4C28-B4D3-C517BBF64D81]. Karutia gen. nov.: [urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:B5D933DB-56F4-4DA2-8A71-116DB48E0449]. Karutia fortunata sp. nov.:[urn:lsid:zoobank.org:act:801AFE8F-A063-4674-8A2B-3C01F87DC422].

Associate Editor: Jennifer Olori