Tree resin can be bad news for a tiny animal: The sticky tree sap can stop small creatures in their tracks, freezing them forever in time. But that’s good news for scientists. If you’ve ever seen “Jurassic Park,” you have some idea of how great tree resin is at preserving finicky soft tissues. The hardened amber can keep specimens remarkably intact for millions of years.
Now, scientists have examined a flight of lizards locked away in the stuff about 100 million years ago. Among the specimens is a tiny young lizard that could be the oldest chameleon ever found — a staggering 78 million years older than the previous record breaker. One of the geckos may be the most complete fossil of its kind and age. These and 10 other fossilized lizards are described in a paper published Friday in Science Advances.
Study co-author Edward Stanley, a University of Florida postdoctoral student in herpetology at the Florida Museum of Natural History, encountered the fossils at the American Museum of Natural History, in New York. They’d been made available for study by a private collector and had been dated back about 100 million years, based on the Burmese mine they’d been found in. But even though the fossils had been uncovered for a while, Stanley and his colleagues were the first to determine how special they were by using 3-D scanning techniques to reconstruct the creatures within.
“The fossil record is sparse because the delicate skin and fragile bones of small lizards do not usually preserve, especially in the tropics, which makes the new amber fossils an incredibly rare and unique window into a critical period of diversification,” Stanley said in a statement.
