Preserved for decades in one of the many cabinets of the Natural History Museum in London were the fossilized bones of a reptile which, now unveiled, come to trace the history of the origin of modern lizards.
Science, with the data at its disposal, had established that lizards as we know them today would have appeared in the middle Jurassic, but the newly discovered fossil, preserved since the 1950s, now allows us to understand that they would have originated in the Triassic late, between 237 and 201 million years ago, about 35 million years earlier than originally thought.
A team of researchers from the University of Bristol in the UK has found that the fossil of the animal is a distant relative of animals such as the Gila monster (Heloderma is suspected), members of the species monitor lizardlike the komodo dragon, and lycra (A fragile snake🇧🇷 And they explain that, at the time of discovery, in southwest England, the technology needed to analyze it didn’t exist.
Scientists have named the fossil with the scientific name Cryptovaranoides microlaniusmeaning “little butcher” in reference to the jaws full of razor-sharp teeth.
Credit: Lavinia Gandolfi
David Whiteside, lead author article published in the journal ‘Science Advances’, says the discovery was a mere coincidence. His team was working on fossils like Clevosaurusa predecessor of the current New Zealand tuatara (Sphenodon punctatus), and the fossil that would rewrite the history of lizard evolution was among them, with the simple identification of “another lizard”. Using X-ray machines, the researchers realized that what they had in their hands was something completely different.
“This is a very special fossil and will likely be one of the most important fossils found in decades,” says Whiteside.
Credits: Lavinia Gandolfi/David Whiteside, Sophie Chambi-Trowell, Mike Benton and The Natural History Museum, London
Experts believe that the discovery of the new fossil will impact all the estimates that have already been made about the origin of lizards and even snakes, as well as the processes and chronology of their evolution.
Michael Breton, another of the authors, explains that the Late Triassic “was a period of great restructuring of terrestrial ecosystems, with the origin of new groups of plants, especially modern conifers, as well as new types of insects and some of the first animal groups such as turtles, crocodiles, dinosaurs and mammals”.
This period of exploding diversity came after “a major reconstruction of life on Earth after the end of the Permian mass extinction” 252 million years ago, in which the planet’s climates fluctuated wildly between very wet and very dry.
