The skulls were preserved and distorted by amber. A recently discovered fossil turned out to be an unusual lizard, not a dinosaur.
The new paper is based on another, better preserved specimen—a fossil also from Myanmar, whose skull is about a half an inch long, and also around 99 million years old. Using CT scans and 3D remodeling, the authors concluded that their fossil was a different species in the same genus as—and that both species were indeed strange lizards rather than small dinosaurs.
“It’s a really weird animal. It’s unlike any other lizard we have today,” Sam Houston State University herpetologist and study co-author Juan Diego Daza said in a. He added that the Cretaceous Period, when these fossils were formed, was when many lizard and snake groups emerged, but “they still hadn’t evolved their modern appearance,” which explains why identifying these fossils can be so challenging. “That’s why they can trick us.
that taxonomic rules for naming and organizing animal species dictate that they have to continue using it. “Sinceis the name originally used to describe this taxon, it has priority and we have to maintain it,” Daza said. “The taxonomy can be sometimes deceiving.”Popular Science
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