NEW YORK: Fossils of a new species of lizard believed to have lived some 80 million years ago have been discovered in Brazil, suggesting that iguanas achieved a worldwide distribution before the final break up of Pangaea.
The fossils of the lizard, dubbed Gueragama sulamericana, were discovered by University of Alberta paleontologists in the municipality of Cruzeiro do Oeste in Southern Brazil in the rock outcrops of a Late Cretaceous desert.
Michael Caldwell, biological sciences professor from the University of Alberta and one of the study’s authors, explains that all the species of iguanas – roughly 1700 – are restricted to the New World and primarily in the Southern United States down to the tip of South America. Close relatives of iguanas including chameleons and bearded dragons, are all Old World.
Caldwell says that this is the first acrodontan (meaning the teeth are fused to the top of their jaws) found in South America, suggesting that ancient iguanians achieved a worldwide distribution before the final break up of Pangaea.
Pegged as a missing link in the sense of the paleobiogeography, the lizard is believed to be the origins of the group suggesting that back in the lower part of the Cretaceous, the southern part of Pangaea was still a kind of single continental chunk.
As with the distributions of plants and animals, which reflect the ancestry of Pangaea when it was whole, the fossils of Gueragama sulamericana indicate that the group is old, that it’s probably Southern Pangaean in its origin. Further, after the break up, the acrodontans and chameleon group dominated in the Old World, and the iguanid side arose out of this acrodontan lineage that was left alone on South America explains Caldwell.
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