A mysterious new species of lizards discovered by accident - in a forgotten sample box

The skull, 52 million years old, has been stored in a specimen box at the Wyoming Museum since 1971.

"Lizards are small and

their remains are prone to decay.Scientists are basically getting fragmented bones,” explains Simon Scarpetta, who studies paleontology at the Jackson School of Geosciences at the University of Texas at Austin. 

Scarpetta decided to take the skull to Jackson Schoolfor a closer look. A study was later published that described the remains as a new species of lizard, which Scarpetta namedKopidosaurus perplexus.

Skull of Kopidosaurus perplexus left side. Credit: Simon Scarpetta.

To study the lizard's skull, Scarpetta createddigital scan of the fossil at the Jackson School's high-resolution CT laboratory. Although some details helped identify the lizard as a new species, other characteristics of the skull overlapped with those of a number of different evolutionary groups.

All these groups belonged to the suborder Iguania.This includes a number of different species of chameleons and iguanas. To better understand where the new species might fit into the suborder, Scarpetta compared the skull data with the phylogenetic tree of Iguania. For these purposes, he used data from other researchers collected from the DNA of living reptiles.

Molecular scaffolds used in the study flagged the main hypothesis of sisterhood for Copidosaurus. Credit: Simon Scarpetta.

It turned out that the previously unknown fossil found belongs to several branches of the evolutionary tree. 

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