Stored for decades in one of the many vaults of London’s Natural History Museum, the now-unveiled fossilized bones of reptiles have come to trace the history of the origin of modern lizards.
Science has proven, with the data it has, that lizards as we know them today would have appeared in the middle Jurassic period, but the newly discovered fossil, stored since the 1950s, now allows us to understand that their origin could have been in the late Triassic period, between 237 and 201 million years ago. , about 35 million years earlier than first thought.
A team of researchers from the University of Bristol, UK, found that the animal’s fossil is close to animals such as the Gila monster (Suspect heloderma), members of the species VaranosLike the Komodo dragon and Lycra (Angus Fragiles🇧🇷 And they point out that at the time it was discovered, in the southwest of England, the technology needed to analyze it didn’t exist.
Scientists gave the fossil the scientific name Cryptovaranoides microlaniuswhich means “little butcher” in reference to jaws full of sharp teeth.
Credit: Lavinia Gandolfi
David Whiteside, lead author of the book Article published in the journal “Science Advances”.He says that the discovery was just a coincidence. His team has been working on excavations such as Clevosaurusancestor of the current New Zealand tuatara (sphenodon punctatus), and among them was the fossil that would rewrite the evolutionary history of lizards, with the simple identification of “another lizard”. Using X-ray machines, the researchers realized that what was in their hands was something completely different.
“This is a very special fossil and it’s probably one of the most important fossils found in recent decades,” Whiteside says.
Credit: Lavinia Gandolfi/David Whiteside, Sophie Champy Trowell, Mike Benton and the Natural History Museum, London
Experts believe that the discovery of the new fossil will have an impact on all estimates already made about the origin of lizards as well as snakes, as well as the processes and chronology of their evolution.
Michael Britton, another author, explains that the late Triassic “was a time of great restructuring of the Earth’s ecosystems, with the emergence of new groups of plants, especially modern conifers, as well as new species of insects and some of the first species of insects. Groups of modern animals such as Turtles, crocodiles, dinosaurs and mammals.”
This period of explosion of diversity followed “a great rebuilding of life on Earth after the end of the Permian mass extinction” 252 million years ago, during which the planet’s climates oscillated intensely between very humid and very dry.
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