Rautiania

Rautiania is an extinct genus of gliding neodiapsid reptiles belonging to the family Weigeltisauridae. Isolated fossil remains of Rautiania are known from the Late Permian of Russia. The genus is known from two species, Rautiania alexandri (the type species) and Rautiania minichi, which differ in aspects of their maxilla and parietal bones. Certain Rautiania fossils have helped to reveal certain aspects of weigeltisaurid anatomy and lifestyle which had long alluded paleontologists, such as the component bones of the "crest" at the back of the head, and the large amount of adaptations towards life in the canopies of forests.

== Discovery == Rautiania fossils were first discovered during a 2005 paleontological expedition into the Orenburg Oblast of Russia. Numerous isolated bones from reptiles of the family Weigeltisauridae were found at the Kul'chumovo-A site. Some of these bones (namely, maxillae and parietals) showed two different morphotypes. In 2006, Russian Academy of Sciences paleontologists Valeriy V. Bulanov and Andrey G. Sennikov described these weigeltisaurid remains as the new genus Rautiania, named after Russian zoologist Aleksandr Sergeevich Rautian (). They named the two different morphotypes as two separate species of Rautiania: R. alexandri and R. minichi. Both of these species had a single parietal bone as their holotype. The type species R. alexandri was also named after Aleksander Rautian, while R. minichi was named after a different Russian paleontologist, Maksim Georgievich Minikh. Additional Rautiania bones (of an unspecified species) from both the skull and the rest of the body were described in 2010, along with the implications these new discoveries provided for weigeltisaurid anatomy in general.