Together with collaborators from China, Susan Evans, Professor of Vertebrate Morphology & Palaeontology and
Head of the UCL Centre for Integrative Anatomy, recently published a paper describing a new genus and species of fossil lizard, Zhongyuanxi jiai, from the Late Cretaceous (~75 million years ago) of Henan Province, China. The specimen is represented by a 3D image of a preserved skull (left). The new lizard belongs to the Anguimorpha, a lizard group represented today by Slow Worms, Gila Monsters and Komodo Dragons. It adds to the known diversity of anguimorph lizards in the fossil deposits of China and Mongolia during the Cretaceous period. Studies of this kind, revealing details of fossil material, show the importance of advanced micro-CT scanners, such as that located here in the Biosciences Imaging Unit and available for hire by those both inside and outside UCL - see links for information and booking here.
Lead author Li Xu plus authors Diansong Gao, Yu Li, Yanhya Wu, Fei Chang and Jie Li are from Henan Natural History Museum, Zhengzhou; and corresponding author, Liping Dong, is from theInstitute of Vertebrate Paleontology and Paleoanthropology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing: Xu L, Dong L-P, Gao D-S, Li Y, Wu Y-H, Chang F, Li J, Evans S E. (2025). A new anguimorph lizard from the Upper Cretaceous of Henan Province, China. Journal of Systematic Palaeontology, 23, 1: 2470790. https://doi.org/10.1080/14772019.2025.2470790.
Reptiles were also at the centre of a presentation given by Susan Evans and Marc Jones (Honorary Research Fellow in the Centre and Curator of Fossil Reptiles at the Natural History Museum, London) at the American Association for Anatomy's 'Anatomy Connected' conference in Portland, Oregon, USA, in March. They were discussing skull structure in the Lepidosauria, a diverse clade of reptiles comprising approximately 7,150 species of lizards, snakes, tuatara (a lizard-like reptile found in New Zealand), and amphisbaenians (essentially, legless lizards).
In particular, Susan and Marc were shedding light on the evolutionary history of the lower temporal bar, which is a bony strut that runs along the lower border of the skull between the orbit and ear in the living tuatara and some fossil lepidosaurs. This bar was previously considered to be an ancestral lepidosaurian trait, but it is now recognised as an advanced feature that has arisen independently in living and some fossil tuatara. More surprisingly, it has also been found in a small group of extinct herbivorous lizards, called the polyglyphanodonts.
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