A Mysterious Fossil Points to the Origins of Lizards and Snakes

Some 240 million years ago, a storm rolled over the tropical edge of the supercontinent of Pangaea and battered the coastal islands. Rain lashed forests of horsetails and ferns, sweeping plants and animals out to sea and burying them in silt.

Among the victims was a small reptile. At the time, it didn’t look like much. But recently in the journal Nature, an international team of scientists identified the animal, called Megachirella,as the earliest known ancestor of the squamates, the gr...