(adsbygoogle = window.adsbygoogle || ).push() She emailed Daza."I remember that as one of the worst days of my life," he said.But the paper also attracted the attention of an unexpected collaborator: Peretti, a gemologist who contacted Daza about another collection of amber fossil lizards from the same region of Myanmar.
After much debate and consultation with colleagues, the scientists finally labelled it an ancient chameleon, about 99 million years old, an estimate based on radiometric dating of crystals at the site where the fossil was found.When she read the study, Susan Evans, professor of vertebrate morphology and paleontology at University College London and an albie expert, instantly recognized the puzzling specimen. One juvenile specimen possessed a hodgepodge of bewildering characteristics, including a specialized tongue bone. "Knowing they had this ballistic tongue gives us a whole new understanding of this entire lineage."A fortunate mistakeThe discovery began with a bumble.In 2016, Stanley and Juan Diego Daza, lead author of the Science study and assistant professor of biological sciences at Sam Houston State University, published a paper presenting a dozen rare amber fossil lizards - or so they thought. The fossils, one previously misidentified as an early chameleon, are the first albies discovered in modern-day Myanmar and the only known examples in amber.They also represent a new genus and species: Yaksha perettii, named after treasure-guarding spirits known as yakshas in Hindu literature and Adolf Peretti, the discoverer of two of the fossils."This discovery adds a super-cool piece to the puzzle of this obscure group of weird little animals," said study co-author Edward Stanley, director of the Florida Museum of Natural History's Digital Discovery and Dissemination Laboratory. Their lineage was distinct from today's frogs, salamanders and caecilians and dates back at least 165 million years, dying out only about 2 million years ago.Now, a set of 99-million-year-old fossils redefines these tiny animals as sit-and-wait predators that snatched prey with a projectile firing of their tongue - and not underground burrowers, as once thought.
Image credits Florida Museum / Edward Stanley.Fossils of bizarre, armored amphibians known as albanerpetontids provide the oldest evidence of a slingshot-style tongue, a new Science study shows.Despite having lizardlike claws, scales and tails, albanerpetontids - mercifully called "albies" for short - were amphibians, not reptiles.
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