Elginia

Extinct genus of reptiles

Elginia is an extinct genus of pareiasaurid known from the Late Permian of Scotland and China. It was named for the area around Elgin in Scotland, which has yielded many fossils referred to as the Elgin Reptiles.

The type species of Elginia, Elginia mirabilis, was first described in 1893 by E. T. Newton, after fellow geologists John Horne and Archibald Geikie informed him of several unusual specimens stored at the Elgin Museum in Scotland. The specimens were collected several years earlier from the coarse sandstones of the nearby Cutties Hillock Quarry. The tetrapod fossils of Elgin are rarely preserved as actual bone material, but instead as external molds within the sandstone. To reconstruct the original shape of the fossils, the sandstone had to be split open, revealing fine sand and metal oxides filling the cavities left by the original bones. Once the infill is prepared away, the cavities are used as molds for casts made of gutta percha latex, which can then be removed and described as proxies for the original fossils. A second species of Elginia, Elginia wuyongae, was described in 2018. It consists of IVPP V 23875, a partial skull and backbone collected from outcrops of the Naobaogou Formation near Baotou, China. Elginia has also been hypothesized to share a relationship with the more basal taxon Dolichopareia (=Nochelesaurus) on the basis of a deeply notched skull table shared with the latter, however other authors have argued that this association was based on taphonomic distortion. Cladistic analyses have tended to nest Elginia deeper among pareiasaurs, making it more derived than the earlier giant Pareiasaurus and Scutosaurus. The placement of Elginia remains volatile, with the taxon hopping between more apical pareiasaurs such as Therischian and more basal pareiasaurs such as Scutosaurus and pumiliopareiasaurs.