At the time when dinosaurs dominated the earth there was also a surprising diversity of large lizards, the so -called monstersauros, of which a new species has just been discovered.
Baptized as Bolg Amondol, a name inspired by the universe of “The Lord of the Rings” by Jrr Tolkien, this new species lived about 80 million years ago in the prehistoric tropical forests of Utah (EU).
His remains were found in the National Monument Grand Staircase-Escalante and were preserved in the National Museum of Natural History of Utah (NHMU).
This armored lizard the size of a mapache reveals the complex evolutionary history of the giant ancestors of the Gila monster, a poisonous lizard that lives today in southern US and northern Mexico.
A team led by the Dinosaur Institute of the Natural History Museum of the Los Angeles County (EU) publishes in Royal Society Open Science the data on the new species.
The identification of a new species highlights the probability that there are many more types of large lizards in the upper Cretaceous.
Today it is known “very little” about the large-scale lizards of the Kaiparowits formation, in the national monument Grand Staircase-escalante. Therefore, when researcher Hank Woolley found in the UTHA museum a bottle of bones labeled as “lizard”, he knew it was “significant.”
The new species measured a meter from tip to tail, “maybe even more, depending on the length of the tail and torso”, which for the modern standards of lizards is very large and something with “what you would not want to get in,” Woolley summarized, one of the signatories, in a statement.
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Monstersauro fossil gives more information about the species
The study provides data on the unique ecosystem of 76 million years ago in which he lived and coexisted with other species of large -scale lizards, said Randy Irimis, of the NHMU and also the author of the article.
That coexistence indicates that it was “a stable and productive ecosystem” where they took advantage of a wide variety of dams and different microhabitats.
The Monstersauros were characterized by their large size and features such as a polygonal armor attached to the skull and sharp needle -shaped teeth, although its history dates back to about one hundred million years, its fossil record is incomplete so that the bolg discovery is of great importance.
The new species was identified from an associated skeleton of fragmentary bones: small pieces of skull, vertebrae, limbs and bone armor called osteodermos.
Most fossil lizards of the dinosaurs are even more fragmented – often only bones or isolated teeth – so the parts of the bowling skeleton that survived contain a large amount of information.
“That means we have more characteristics to evaluate and compare with similar aspects, and what is more important, we can use those characteristics to understand the evolutionary relationships of this animal and test hypotheses about its place in the tree of the life of the lizards,” said Woolley.
The closest known relative of this new species comes from the other end of the planet, from the Gobi desert, in Asia.
Although it is known that dinosaurs were traveling among the continents connected during the upper cretaceous, the bolg discovery reveals that they also did it smaller animals.
With EFE information
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