China News Service, Beijing, August 26 (Reporter Sun Zifa) The internationally renowned academic journal "Nature" recently published a paleontology research paper saying that researchers have discovered a similarity in the Triassic strata of Argentina with a history of about 231 million years. The fossils of reptile skulls of lizards reveal the origin and rise of squamosaurus reptile groups such as snakes, lizards and tuatara.
According to the paper, scaly dragons are scaly reptiles, including scaly (lizards and snakes) and wedge-toothed lizards, such as tuatara (a New Zealand reptile).
There are more than 11,000 species of Squamosaurus, which is the most diverse group among the existing terrestrial vertebrates. However, due to the scattered and disordered fossil records, it is closely related to their sister lineages (including crocodiles, birds and non-birds). Compared with dinosaurs, people know very little about it.
Fossil restoration process (pictures from Jorge Blanco, Gabriela Sobral and Ricardo Martinez).
Photo courtesy of Springer Nature
The corresponding author of the paper, Ricardo Martínez, National University of San Juan, Argentina, and colleagues conducted research on a well-preserved reptile skull fossil discovered in Argentina about 231 million years ago, and believed that the fossil was earlier than Before the separation of the scaly and the scaly lizard, it was close to the origin of the scalysaurus, and it may be one of the earliest known scalysaurus.
They pointed out that this skull fossil has similar features to modern tuatara, indicating that some previously inferred unique anatomical features of the wedge-toothed lizard may have originated in the early evolution of squamatosaurus.
This fossil is about 11 million years later than the earliest known Lepisaurus fossils in Europe, and is about the same time as the oldest known Lepisaurus fossils in South America.
According to the author of the paper, these findings indicate that the crown group and stem group of scale dragons existed at least during the 10 million years of the Triassic, and the geographical distribution of early scale dragons was much wider than previously thought.
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