This 240-Million-Year-Old Reptile Is the 'Mother of All Lizards'.

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About 240 million years ago,Megachirella wachtleritrod the vegetation in what is now the Dolomites region of northern Italy.
Credit: Davide Bonadonna
▼ HBO's "Game of Thrones" features a "Mother of Dragons," but a fossil that's hundreds of millions of years old was recently identified as the "mother of all lizards" (and snakes, too).
This ancient lizard was the direct ancestor of approximately 10,000 species alive today that have inhabited the planet for more than 240 million years.
Paleontologists initially described the tiny reptile,Megachirella wachtleri,in 2003. But recent scans revealed features in the fossil that were hidden, enabling scientists to identifyMegachirellaas the oldest known ancestor in the squamate lineage — the reptile group that includes lizards and snakes.
Megachirella,which predates the fossils previously thought to belong to the earliest squamates by around 75 million years, bridged the gap between the oldest known squamates and the estimated origins of this reptile group derived from molecular data, researchers reported in a new study.
The Megachirella fossil was found in the Alps in northern Italy. It was estimated it to be about 240 million years old and scientists thought it belonged to a lepidosaur, a type of primitive reptile. But certain lizard-like  featureshinted that the fossil might provide valuable and unique clues about squamates, lead study author Tiago Simões, a doctoral candidate in biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, told Live Science in an email.
"It deserved further attention — especially in the form of CT [computed tomography] scanning — to provide greater anatomical details and an improved data set, to understand its placement in the evolutionary tree of reptiles," Simões said.  (▪ ▪ ▪)

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samgmu

wow !!

wangwilly

It's like komodo...