Bolosauridae is an extinctfamily of ankyramorphparareptiles known from the latest Carboniferous (Gzhelian) or earliest Permian (Asselian) to the early Guadalupianepoch (latest Roadian stage) of North America, China, Germany, Russia and France.[1][2] The bolosaurids were unusual for their time period by being bipedal, the oldest known tetrapods to have been so. Their teeth suggest that they were herbivores. The bolosaurids were a rare group and died out without any known descendants. The following cladogram shows the phylogenetic position of the Bolosauridae, from Johannes Müller, Jin-Ling Li and Robert R. Reisz, 2008.[3]
^Marcello Ruta; Juan C. Cisneros; Torsten Liebrect; Linda A. Tsuji; Johannes Muller (2011). "Amniotes through major biological crises: faunal turnover among Parareptiles and the end-Permian mass extinction". Palaeontology. 54 (5): 1117–1137. doi:10.1111/j.1475-4983.2011.01051.x.
^Johannes Müller; Jin-Ling Li & Robert R. Reisz (2008). "A new bolosaurid parareptile, Belebey chengi sp. nov., from the Middle Permian of China and its paleogeographic significance". Naturwissenschaften. 95 (12): 1169–1174. doi:10.1007/s00114-008-0438-0. PMID18726080.
