A Jar of Fossil Bones Long Stored at a Museum Led Scientists to Discover a Goblin-Like Lizard From 76 Million Years Ago
Fossils described in a new study speak to a previously unknown large-bodied lizard diversity that existed alongside dinosaurs
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A container of bones at the Natural History Museum of Utah that sat in storage for 20 years has now led to the discovery of an extinct “monster,” in the latest reminder that museum collections can continue to reveal surprising findings.
The 76-million-year-old fossils came to light in 2005 at the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument’s Kaiparowits Formation in southern Utah, a rock formation that has turned out to be a paleontological hotspot. But after their discovery, the bones ended up in a jar labeled “lizard” at the museum. It wasn’t until a scientist peeked in almost two decades later that he realized the remains represented a previously undocumented species.
“I… was like, ‘oh wow, there’s a fragmentary skeleton here,’” Hank Woolley, a research fellow at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s Dinosaur Institute, says in a statement.
Woolley and his colleagues describe the new species, named Bolg amondol, in a study published Wednesday in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
The bygone creature was a raccoon-sized reptile, specifically a monstersaur—a member of a group of large, sharp-toothed, armored lizards that still exist in deserts today, including the area where researchers originally discovered Bolg’s remains.
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“Despite almost a century of collection” of monstersaur fossils, “their record remains extremely fragmentary,” the researchers write in the study. The skeleton found in the jar is also in fragments, but scientists say it reveals a lot.
“We have a broad sample of the skeleton preserved,” Woolley says in the statement. “There’s no overlapping bones—there’s not two left hip bones or anything like that. So, we can be confident that these remains likely belonged to a single individual.”
The lizard would have been three or four feet long, including its tail, and looked “like a goblin that sprang from the rocks,” Woolley tells New Scientist’s Meagan Mulcair. “I think you’d want to avoid it,” he adds.
In fact, Bolg is the name of a goblin prince from J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The fantasy author is also behind the species name amondol. “Amon” means mound and “dol” means head in his Elvish language, Sindarin, which the researchers use in reference to the mound-like, bony deposits in skin on the creature’s skull, known as osteoderms.
Rather appropriately, the newly discovered species is an ancestor of today’s Gila monsters—one of two of the world’s only dangerously venomous lizards.
“Discovering a new species of lizard that is an ancestor of modern Gila monsters is pretty cool in and of itself, but what’s particularly exciting is what it tells us about the unique 76-million-year-old ecosystem it lived in,” Randall Irmis, a co-author of the study and a curator of paleontology at the Natural History Museum of Utah, says in the statement.
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Namely, Bolg and other fossils from the Kaiparowits Formation described in the study indicate that at least three types of predatory lizards existed in this region of modern-day southern Utah during the Late Cretaceous. This period’s previously unknown diversity of big lizards points to an ecosystem that was stable, productive and ecologically diverse.
“Any picture of the primeval tropical forests of North America should include nightmarish, dinosaur-hunting lizards pushing through the undergrowth and climbing through the trees,” study co-author Joseph Sertich at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute and Colorado State University, who originally discovered the fossils, tells New Scientist.
The fact that Bolg is now extinct, however, should be a cautionary tale suggesting that even “very scary monsters” can be fragile, Randall Nydam, a vertebrate paleontologist at Midwestern University in Illinois who was not involved in the study, adds to the publication.
Today, Bolg’s closest known relative lives in Asia’s Gobi Desert. This demonstrates that, like dinosaurs, smaller animals also roamed across connected continents during the Late Cretaceous.
“It sort of highlights this bio-geographic highway,” Woolley tells Courthouse News’ Sam Ribakoff. “There was a lot of sort of back and forth that folks are finding in flora and fauna in the late Cretaceous,” facilitated through the Bering Land Bridge that connected North America and Asia during the last ice age.
