Scientists finally find the 240-million-year-old 'mother of all lizards'

Here's a fact you should know about the world in which you live: It's home to more kinds of scaly reptiles than all the mammal families combined. The reptile order Squamata, which includes snakes, lizards and legless worm-looking creatures known as amphisbaenians, is the largest order of living land vertebrates on the planet.

And yet scientists know surprisingly little about where all those geckos and vipers and iguanas and pythons came from. Genetic evidence suggests the order originate...