World’s oldest lizard fossil stuns scientists after being unearthed in BRISTOL with remarkable detail still intact

The “world’s oldest” lizard is an ancient one that is 205 million years old, according to a recent study.

The remarkably detailed fossilized lizard was discovered in a quarry close to Bristol, UK.

After all that time, its teeth are still intact.

The lizard, known as Cryptovaranoides microlanius, is from a time when mollusks ruled the sea and reptiles dominated the land.

The Jurassic era, commonly referred to as the age of dinosaurs, began at the end of the Triassic period.

But there has been a lot of discussion about the small skeleton.

Since the initial study on the fossil was released in 2022, scientists have been debating the specimen’s identity.

In a follow-up article published in Royal Society Open Science, Dr. David Whiteside, the lead author of the original work that was published in Science Advances, responded to the criticism.

He affirmed that the small Bristol reptile is, in fact, the earliest modern-type lizard in the world.

In addition to being the oldest known lizard, the lizard has delayed the emergence of these animals by about 30 million years.

According to a statement from co-author Professor Michael Benton, “We were therefore surprised, perhaps even shocked, that another team of academics suggested in 2023 that Cryptovaranoides was not a lizard or even a lizard relative, but in fact an archosauromorph, more closely related to crocodilians and dinosaurs.”

The Bristol team went back to the original specimen and performed additional CT and X-ray scans on the little skeleton.

The findings demonstrated that Cryptovaranoides was a lizard and not an archosauropmorph based on the limb bones, jaws, teeth, and skull.

Whiteside stated that a phylogenetic study was required to test the outcome of all of this.

Here, we encode hundreds of anatomical traits from different archosauromorphs, Cryptovaranoides, and other extant and extinct lizards.

“We repeatedly performed the investigation, which confirmed our initial conclusion that the small Bristol reptile is, in fact, the oldest modern-type lizard in the world.