Fossil Reveals Secrets of One of the Nature’s Most Mysterious Reptiles
The New York Times
The specimen shows that modern tuataras found in New Zealand are little changed from ancestors that lived 190 million years.
New Zealand’s tuataras look like somber iguanas. But these spiny reptiles are not actually lizards. Instead, they are the last remnant of a mysterious and ancient order of reptiles known as the Rhynchocephalians that mostly vanished after their heyday in the Jurassic period.
And they truly are the oddballs of the reptile family. Tuataras can live for more than a century, inhabit chilly climates and are able to slide their jaws back and forth to shear through insects, seabirds and each other. They even possess a rudimentary third eye below the scales on the top of their heads that may help them track the sun.
These bizarre traits make tuatara an evolutionary enigma, and a spotty fossil record of its long-lost kin has confounded paleontologists. Likely outcompeted by lizards and snakes, virtually all Rhynchocephalians went extinct at the close of the Mesozoic Era. Many left little more than dusty tooth and jaw fragments behind.
