Found by chance in Basel: researchers discovered fossils of giant lizards

class=”sc-29f61514-0 jbwksb”>

The fossils come from Hüenerbach in Emmental BE, the Natural History Museum of Basel announced on Monday. Paleontologist Bastien Mennecart has discovered two missing teeth among hundreds of fossil bones and teeth in the Basel Museum of Natural History’s paleontological vertebrate collection.

In collaboration with an international team of researchers from Poland, Germany and Switzerland, he showed that the protruding teeth and insides of the teeth correspond to typical features of monitor lizards. The findings on the find were published Sunday in the scientific journal “Swiss Journal of Geoscience.”

Fossil teeth, 17 million years old, are among the oldest evidence of the famous giant lizard Varanus from Europe. The weather in Switzerland at that time was five to ten degrees warmer than it is today, writes the Basel Museum of Natural History. The last known monitor lizards in Europe lived in Greece until less than a million years ago.

Today there are monitor lizards in Africa, Australia and Asia. With body lengths of up to three meters, they are among the largest land iguanas in the world.

(SDA)

Source : Blick