This ‘Fierce Lizard’ Fossil Is a Missing Link Between Dinos and Their Ancestors
Fossilized Skull. Photo: Felipe Pinheiro

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This ‘Fierce Lizard’ Fossil Is a Missing Link Between Dinos and Their Ancestors

Scientists discover a 250-million-year-old fossil in southern Brazil

Some 252 million years ago, 90 percent of all species on Earth were wiped out, maybe because of massive volcanic eruptions in what's now Russia. Scientists are very curious about the creatures that lived through this "Great Dying."

In a new study, a team from the UK and Brazil describe a 250-million-year-old fossilized reptile, called Teyujagua paradoxa, which lived not long after the mass extinction. This ancient lizard is an ancestor of dinosaurs, as well as modern-day crocodiles and birds.

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"Me and my students are looking into what happened after the 'end of the world,'" study author Felipe Pinheiro, from Universidade Federal do Pampa, São Gabriel, told me in an email. They were digging up rocks in southern Brazil that date back to the early Triassic, when one of his students literally tripped over this fossil.

After taking it back to the lab and cleaning it up, Pinheiro and his team knew they'd found something special: The skull of a four-legged lizard that would have measured about 1.5 meters long, with the pointy teeth of a meat-eater, and nostrils that point upwards like a crocodile, suggesting it lived and hunted around the edges of lakes and rivers.

Its name, which comes from the language of the Guarani ethnic group, means "fierce lizard," and refers to a mythical animal with the body of a lizard and the head of a dog.

Fieldwork in Brazil. Photo Credit: Felipe Pinheiro

Teyujagua "is an interesting piece of the puzzle of the early origins of dinosaurs," Pinheiro said. It marks a transition point between primitive reptiles and a huge variety of creatures that came later—everything from hummingbirds to Tyrannosaurus rex. Unlike its ancestors, Teyujagua were "small, generalist animals," Pinheiro said, "that had an almost empty world to colonize and diversify."