Fossil found in drawer is found to be oldest known modern lizard ancestor

The fossilised remains of a small, sharp-toothed lizard, left in a cupboard for more than half a century, have pushed back the origin of the group that includes snakes and lizards.

The specimen was collected in the 1950s by Pamela L Robinson. The creature's true identity was not appreciated as it was wrongly labelled and stored.

Advances in technology have enabled researchers to take a second look at a reptile that holds a key position in the family tree.

Prof Michael Benton, a palaeontologist at the University of Bristol and a co, said that it was partly a story of neglected fossils in a drawer and partly a story of not being able to do the work that was done.

The long-tailed creature is thought to have been around for over 200 years. A hidden lizard-like animal is referred to as the first term because it is hidden in rock crevices. Microbutcher is a nod to the creature's recurved, blade-like teeth.

They were able to look at the fossil in detail and study the bones that were trapped in the rock. The animal's skull was 3 cm long. He said that the ribs are just minute.

One of the scaled reptile groups includes creatures such as lizards and snakes. The snakes start out as lizards.

The creature has key hallmarks of modern lizards, such as modified bones at the back of the skull, making it the oldest such reptile found so far.

The Komodo monitor, the huge predatory lizard of Indonesia, is one of 350 species of the anguimorph lizard.

The team says the finding pushes back the origin of squamates by at least 34m years. It was thought that the oldest lizard in the modern world was about 168 million years old.

The team says that the discovery has important implications for understanding the rate of evolution within the tree of life and the timescale andtrigger of biodiversity within modern squamates.

The common ancestor of all those living forms was found in the late Triassic period.

He said that the title of the last common ancestor of modern squamates is likely to belong to another creature.

Prof Steve Brusatte, a palaeontologist at the University of Edinburgh who was not involved in the work, said that lizards and snakes were more of a mystery than mammals, birds, and crocodiles.

Many of the delicate animals that have been preserved as fossils are so fragile that they are difficult to study.

If its identification as a modern-style lizard is correct, it means that lizards were beginning to diversify, alongside some of the earliest dinosaurs and mammals. It proves that there are important British fossils in the field waiting to be discovered or in museum collections waiting to be studied.