Reptile Ancestor Found, Lived 310 Million Years Ago

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Experts found reptile long and tortuous body that lived about 310 million years ago. The ancestor of this reptile is named Joermungandr bolti, after the legendary giant serpent in Viking mythology who once fought against Thor the god of thunder.

But unlike the mythical Jormungandr Viking, which was so gigantic that it was described as being able to envelop the Earth, the ancient reptile J. bolti found was only a few inches long.

This creature is a microsaurus aka lizard small, is an early group of reptiles that were among the first vertebrates (animals with backbones) to evolve on land.

J. bolti has an elongated slender body with short limbs and a blunt skull. The fossils are so well-preserved that they retain a special scale texture that resembles the scales for expulsion of dung in modern reptiles. Features on its body suggest this tiny microsaur dug a tunnel underground and slithered like a snake.

Quoted from Live Science, currently the microsaurus fossil is stored in Chicago’s Field Museum. Fossil it originates from Mazon Creek in Illinois, where there are deposits that have preserved many fossils of complete or near-complete organisms dating from the Carboniferous period (about 359 million to 299 million years ago).

According to the University of California, Berkeley Museum of Paleontology, microsaurus represents some of the oldest fossils of amniotes, vertebrates that developed embryos in fluid-filled eggs with multiple membrane layers.

“J. bolti (‘bolti’ is the name for the late paleontologist John R. Bolt, curator emeritus of amphibian and reptile fossils at the Field Museum) was a microsaurus of the group called Recumbirostra, which lived about 40 million to 50 million years, that is, from the mid-Carbon to the early Permian, about 299 million to 251 million years ago,” said study lead author Arjan Mann, postdoctoral fellow in paleobiology at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History in Washington, DC.

Mann says most of the fossils in this group of microsaurus are from the Permian, so J. bolti provides a glimpse of earlier microsaurus.

“Its body measuring just 1.9 inches from nose to tip of tail, slender, cylindrical and relatively smooth, with stubby limbs and tapering tailbones suggesting a short and rounded tail, similar to the tail morphology of some modern geckos and some lizards that use tail to store fat,” the study’s researchers wrote.

Mann said the features of oval, jagged scales covering the body, as well as a strong skull with several fused bones, may have helped the microsaurus withstand the pressure of excavation.

“We thought it was something like a headfirst burrower; the head would punch into the ground to dig a hole like modern reptiles. The elongated shape of J. bolti would have allowed the microsaurus to squirm on the ground like ular, and the scales appear to have a similar pattern to what we see on modern fossilized reptile (burrowing) scales, which may have been used to excrete feces,” he explained.

If microsaurs were indeed early amniotes, the snakelike shape of J. bolti (and the elongated body shape of other microsaurs) offers a new perspective on how quickly animals’ bodies diversified once they crawled onto dry land from the sea.

“Most of the early amniotes looked like small lizards, and current interpretations of the records fossil shows that the transition to more diverse forms is slow. However, J. bolti and other long-bodied microsauruses suggest otherwise.”

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