Baby lizards in amber In a recent post entitled rarer than hen’s teeth (see on.fb.m

Baby lizards in amberIn a recent post entitled rarer than hen’s teeth (see http://on.fb.me/1Xa6Mih) I discussed the extreme paucity of lizards and other larger critters in amber, because they are usually strong enough to pull free of the sticky tree resin when they get caught in it. Just as I wrote this of course, a museum drawer spits out a whole clump of them caught as they scampered around a tropical forest around 99 million years ago (in the mid Cretaceous), and found entombed in Burmese amber. Luckily a further flow of sap entombed them before scavengers ate them or they could rot. These baby reptiles are 75 million years older than the previous record holder amongst lizard fossils.They were found many decades ago but have only recently been examined, and they are providing many clues about the vagaries of lizard evolution. One tiny infant is chameleon like and complete, including eyes, curled tail, coloured scales and a protruding tongue (and held to be the stem of the line, making them five times older than previously thought)), while other partial ones include a gecko (complete with adhesive pads on its feet) and an arctic lizard. The dozen lizards ranged from 11 to 40 mm in size, so the sap must have been very sticky and viscous.This discovery gave researchers a unique snapshot of a long gone ecosystem, since such diversity has never been found before from one place and time. The find will also make a good calibration point to date the radiation speed of squamate species (the lizards and snakes). One surprise the CT scans revealed was how similar they were to extant relatives, showing that at the macro scale at least evolution has been slow in these orders of life.LozImage credit: Reuters http://bit.ly/1Tqv5umhttp://bit.ly/1YteAgzhttp://huff.to/1R18nZwhttp://bit.ly/220mzDUhttp://bit.ly/1QyXdZT -- source link

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