Oldest identified lizard ancestor found in England

Scientists introduced Wednesday they’ve found the oldest-known member of the lizard household in southwest England, a tiny creature that used its surprisingly massive tooth to hunt cockroaches 242 million years in the past.

The historic reptile, which lived through the Middle Triassic epoch shortly earlier than the rise of the dinosaurs, was so small its complete physique may match within the palm of a human hand.

“The new animal is unlike anything yet discovered and has made us all think again about the evolution of the lizard, snakes and the tuatara,” the latter of which is a New Zealand reptile, Dan Marke of the University of Bristol mentioned in an announcement.

The skeleton of the oldest identified member of the lepidosauria order, a household of reptiles, was discovered at a fossil-rich seashore in Devon, southwest England, in 2015.

But determining what it truly was took the scientists years, and the invention was introduced in a examine within the journal Nature on Wednesday.

“The new fossil shows almost none of what we expected,” mentioned Marke, the examine’s lead creator.

Modern lizards and snakes have {a partially} hinged cranium and loads of tooth on the roof of their mouth — however this historic ancestor had neither.

“Not only this but it possesses some spectacularly large teeth compared to its closest relatives,” the palaeobiologist mentioned.

It additionally has a bone operating from cheek to jaw, a characteristic it shares solely with the distinctive tuatara that’s also known as a “living fossil”.

“The new beast” used these tooth “to pierce and shear the hard cuticles of its insect prey, pretty much as the tuatara does today,” mentioned examine co-author Michael Benton, additionally from Bristol University.

The fossil was tough to check as a result of it’s so small — the cranium is simply 1.5 centimetres (0.6 of an inch) large — and was preserved in a big rock.

So the British researchers scanned it utilizing the European Synchrotron Radiation Facility, which works as a form of enormous microscope producing X-rays 100 billion occasions brighter than these utilized in hospitals.

The Synchrotron allowed the scientists to “zoom in on large objects and obtain very high-resolution images,” mentioned Vincent Fernandez, a palaeontologist on the facility in France.

The scientists named the lizard ancestor Agriodontosaurus helsbypetrae, after the Helsby Sandstone Formation the place it was found.

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