Scutosaurus

Scutosaurus ("shield lizard") is an extinct genus of pareiasaur parareptiles. Its genus name refers to large plates of armor scattered across its body. It was a large anapsid reptile that, unlike most reptiles, held its legs underneath its body to support its great weight. Fossils have been found in the Sokolki Assemblage Zone of the Malokinelskaya Formation in European Russia, close to the Ural Mountains, dating to the late Permian (Lopingian) between 264 and 252 million years ago. The first fossils were uncovered by Russian paleontologist Vladimir Prokhorovich Amalitskii while documenting plant and animal species in the Upper Permian sediments in the Northern Dvina River, Arkhangelsk District, Northern European Russia. Amalitskii had discovered the site in 1899, and he and his wife Anne Amalitskii continued to oversee excavation until 1914, recovering numerous nearly complete and articulated (in their natural position) skeletons belonging to a menagerie of different animals. Official diagnoses of these specimens was delayed due to World War I. The first published name of what is now called Scutosaurus karpinskii was in 1917 by British zoologist David Meredith Seares Watson, who captioned a reconstruction of its scapulocoracoid based on the poorly preserved specimen PIN 2005/1535 "Pariasaurus Karpinskyi, Amalitz" (giving credit to Amalitskii for the name). Amalitskii died later that year, and the actual diagnosis of the animal was posthumously published in 1922, with the name "Pareiosaurus" karpinskii, and the holotype specimen designated as the nearly complete skeleton PIN 2005/1532. Three partial skulls were also found, but Amalitskii decided to split these off into new species as "P. elegans", "P. tuberculatus", and "P. horridus". "Pariasaurus" and "Pareiosaurus" were both misspellings of the South African Pareiasaurus. In 1930, Soviet vertebrate paleontologist Aleksandra Paulinovna Anna Hartmann-Weinberg said that the pareiasaur material from North Dvina represents only 1 species, and that this species was distinct enough from other Pareiasaurus to justify placing it in a new genus.