Archives of The Cold Blooded News

The Newsletter of the Colorado Herpetological Society

Volume 31, Number 4;   April, 2004

New Type of Ancient Lizard-like Reptile Found

The fossils are of a new type of sphenodontian, an ancient family of primitive reptiles that roamed the Earth at the time of the dinosaurs and disappeared about 110 million years ago.

The remains uncovered in a quarry in Patagonia are about 90 million years old and could explain how their only living relative, the tuatara, managed to survive.

"This new discovery helps to bridge the considerable gap in the fossil record (around 120 million years) that separates the Early Cretaceous sphenodontians from their living relatives," Fernando Novas, of the Argentine Museum of Natural History in Buenos Aires, said in the science journal Nature. The tuatara, which is only found in New Zealand, is the last remaining Sphenodontia, and, because it has not changed much from its ancestors, it is called a living fossil.

The remains found in Patagonia belong to a creature about a yard long and belong to the largest sphenodontian discovered so far. They show that the creatures survived longer in Gondwana, an ancient super-continent that incorporated South America, Africa, India, Australia, and Antarctica, than in other northern areas.