UK-based Bristol University and Natural History Museum officials announced yesterday that they had identified a ‘mislabeled’ fossil from the 1950s as the ancestor of today’s lizards in the museum’s storage cupboard. It was emphasized that the discovery, contrary to what is known, shifted the emergence of lizards and reptiles belonging to similar families back 35 million years. Discovered by Dr. David Whiteside and his team examined the fossil by X-ray scanning and revealed that the specimen was related to modern-day lizards.
LABELED AS ANOTHER REPTILE
Stating that this is the most important discovery of recent years, Dr. Whiteside described the discovery process as follows; “I first identified the specimen in a cabinet full of Clevosaurus fossils in the warehouses of the Natural History Museum in London, where I was a Scientific Research Fellow… Our specimen was simply labeled ‘Clevosaurus and another reptile’. As we continued to research the specimen, we became more and more convinced that it was actually more closely related to modern-day lizards than to the Tuatara group. “We did X-ray scans of the fossils in college, and that allowed us to reconstruct the fossil in three dimensions and see all the tiny bones hidden in the rock.”
(DHA)