Tiny lizards trapped in amber 100 million years ago may be some of the oldest of their kind

One of the geckos is believed to be a staggering 78 million years older than the previous record breaker. Scientists say it's a 'rare and unique window ' into evolution

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.

Science Advances

The ancient “chameleon” seems to be a sort of missing link, showing a point early in the family’s evolution. It hadn’t yet developed the fused toes that modern chameleons used for climbing trees, but it did have the family’s iconic projectile tongue, at least based on hints found in its jaw.

More analysis is needed to determine whether the creature really had this feature — and whether it can be placed in the same branch of the lizard family tree as a modern chameleon. The researchers involved say they will classify the new species in a future paper.

Even if the “chameleon” is something else and loses its superlative title, the dozen specimens provide a rare look into the diversification of lizards.

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