Lizards’ History!

The mother of all lizards found in Italian Alps

PARIS: Scientists said Wednesday they had tracked down the oldest known lizard, a tiny creature that lived about 240 million years ago when Earth had a single continent and dinosaurs were brand new, reports AFP. Scans of the fossilised skeleton of Megachirella revealed the chameleon-sized reptile was an ancestor of today’s lizards and snakes, which belong to a group called squamates, an international team wrote in the science journal Nature.

This finding dragged the group back in time by 75 million years, and means that “lizards inhabited the planet since at least 240 million years ago,” study co-author Tiago Simoes of the University of Alberta in Canada told AFP. That, in turn, suggested that squamates had already split from other ancient reptiles before the Permian/Triassic mass extinction some 252 million years ago, and survived it.

Up to 95 percent of marine- and 75 percent of terrestrial life on Earth was lost. Megachirella, discovered some 20 years ago buried in compacted sand and clay layers in the Dolomites mountain range in northeast Italy, was initially misclassified as a close lizard relative. But Simoes had questions.

“When I first saw the fossil I realised it had important features that could link it to the early evolution of lizards,” he said.

 

 

Lizards History!

The mother of all lizards found in Italian Alps

PARIS: Scientists said Wednesday they had tracked down the oldest known lizard, a tiny creature that lived about 240 million years ago when Earth had a single continent and dinosaurs were brand new, reports AFP. Scans of the fossilised skeleton of Megachirella revealed the chameleon-sized reptile was an ancestor of todays lizards and snakes, which belong to a group called squamates, an international team wrote in the science journal Nature. This finding dragged the group back in time by 75 million years, and means that lizards inhabited the planet since at least 240 million years ago, study co-author Tiago Simoes of the University of Alberta in Canada told AFP. That, in turn, suggested that squamates had already split from other ancient reptiles before the Permian/Triassic mass extinction some 252 million years ago, and survived it. Up to 95 percent of marine- and 75 percent of terrestrial life on Earth was lost. Megachirella, discovered some 20 years ago buried in compacted sand and clay layers in the Dolomites mountain range in northeast Italy, was initially misclassified as a close lizard relative. But Simoes had questions. When I first saw the fossil I realised it had important features that could link it to the early evolution of lizards, he said.