Moschowhaitsia

Moschowhaitsia is an extinct genus of therocephalian therapsids from the Late Permian (Guadalupian) of Russia and China. The type species, Moschowhaitsia vjuschkovi, was discovered in the Changxingian-aged Archosaurus Assemblage Zone of Russia and named in 1963 by Russian palaeontologist Leonid Petrovich Tatarinov. A second species was discovered in Jingtai County of Gansu, China in 2020 and named as M. lidaqingi in 2023 by Jun Liu and Fernando Abdala, the first whaitsiid therocephalian to be discovered in China. It was among the larger carnivores in the faunal assemblages it occurred in, with a skull-length of up to in M. vjuschkovi and an even larger estimated for M. lidaqingi, one of the largest therocephalian skulls reported. The genus name Moschowhaitsia alludes to two other therocephalians, Moschorhinus and Whaitsia (a junior synonym of Theriognathus), due to the structure of its palate combining physical features of both these genera.

==Classification and taxonomy== Moschowhaitsia is a member of the derived therocephalian clade Whaitsiidae, ranked as a family under traditional Linnaean taxonomy. Tatarinov initially assigned Moschowhaitsia to its own monotypic subfamily of whaitsiids, Moschowhaitsiinae, on the basis that it appeared to him as an intermediate form bridging the anatomy of two other subfamilies of whaitsiids, Whaitsiinae and Moschorhininae. Some later researchers, including Tatarinov himself, would later elevate Moschowhaitsia to family level distinction (Moschowhaitsiidae), along with other subtaxa of whaitsiids, although nonetheless retaining the existing close taxonomic relationships under the superfamily Whaitsioidea.