Oldest known lizard ancestor discovered in England

Scientists announced on Wednesday that they had discovered the oldest member of the lizard family in the southwest of England, a small creature that used its surprisingly large teeth to hunt cockroaches 242 million years ago.

The old reptile, who lived during the time of the average Triassic shortly before the rise of dinosaurs, was so small that his whole body could hold in the palm of a human hand.

“The new animal is not still very discovered and made us all think about the evolution of the lizard, snakes and tuatara,” said the latter a New Zealand reptile, “said Dan Marke of the University of Bristol in a statement.

The skeleton of the oldest member known to the Lepidosauria order, a family of reptiles, was found in a beach rich in fossils in Devon, in the southwest of England in 2015.

But to determine what he has done for years to scientists, and the discovery was announced in a study of the journal Nature Wednesday.

“The new fossil does not show almost anything that we expected,” said Marke, the main author of the study.

Modern lizards and snakes have a partially hinge skull and a lot of teeth on the roof of their mouth – but this old ancestor had neither.

“Not only that, but he has spectacularly large teeth compared to his closest parents,” said the paleobiologist.

He also has a jaw cheek bone, a feature that he only shares with the single Tuatara which is often called “living fossil”.

“The New Beast” used these teeth “to unravel and shear hard cuticles of its prey of insects, roughly as Tuatara does today,” said the co-author of the Michael Benton study, also from the University of Bristol.

The fossil was difficult to study because it is so small – the skull is only 1.5 centimeters (0.6 inch) wide – and was kept in a large rock.

British researchers therefore digitized it using the European Synchrotron radiation installation, which works as a sort of huge microscope producing X 100 billion times more shiny than those used in hospitals.

The synchrotron allowed scientists to “zoom in large objects and to obtain images with very high resolution”, said Vincent Fernandez, paleontologist at the establishment in France.

Scientists have appointed the ancestor Lézard Agriodontosaurus Helsbypetrae, after the Helsby sandstone training where he was discovered.

© 2025 AFP