Simorhinella

Simorhinella is an extinct genus of therocephalian therapsids from the Guadalupian, or Middle Permian, of South Africa. It is includes only a single species, Simorhinella baini, named by South African paleontologist Robert Broom in 1915. Broom named Simorhinella on the basis of a single small fossil from the British Museum of Natural History collected in 1878 that includes the skull and jaws from the eye sockets forward of a young juvenile. The skull is unusual in that it has an extremely short and broad snout, unlike the longer and narrower snouts of most other early therocephalians. Because of the skull's distinctiveness, the classification of Simorhinella within Therocephalia was unclear during the 20th and early 21st centuries. In 2014, the skull of a much larger therocephalian was described and identified as an adult of Simorhinella by Fernando Abdala and colleagues based on a unique combination of shared features, including a distinctive bony crest on the vomer of the palate found in both specimens. From its anatomy, they proposed that Simorhinella was closely related to the basal therocephalian Lycosuchus and so placed it in the family Lycosuchidae, though its precise evolutionary relationships remain untested.

==History of discovery== The holotype specimen of Simorhinella, NHMUK (formerly BM) 49422, was discovered by road engineer and geologist Thomas Bain some time in the late 19th century, and was acquired by the British Museum (later the Natural History Museum, London) in 1878. It was collected at the Weltevreden farm in the Prince Albert district of Western Cape Province in South Africa. The specimen remained undescribed until palaeontologist Robert Broom examined the British Museum's collection of carnivorous therapsids in 1915, wherein he named the specimen Simorhinella baini. Broom's description of the specimen was brief, but he correctly identified it as belonging to a young juvenile therocephalian.