Earliest world record of green lizards (Lacertilia, Lacertidae) from the Lower Miocene of Central Europe

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Abstract

The earliest world record of the green lizards, Lacerta viridis group, is described from the lower Miocene of Central Europe. The fossils come from greenish, calcareous marls and limnic clayey silts of the Ottnangian zone MN 4 of the Dolnice locality near Cheb in the Czech Republic. Sediments are interpreted as marginal, riparian facies. The material consists of isolated frontal bones of two different ontogenetic stages and one isolated fragment of parietal. Their morphology is identical to that of the extant members of the L. viridis group. However, the fossil material is much older than the previously described specimens of green lizards. Therefore, this finding extends our knowledge about the evolution and stratigraphic range of the group and about composition of the early Miocene herpetofauna in central Europe.

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Visualization of an Oxygen-deficient Bottom Water Circulation in Osaka Bay, Japan

Y Hosokawa, K Furukawa, H. Yoshimura … (2000)

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Molecular phylogenetics of squamata: the position of snakes, amphisbaenians, and dibamids, and the root of the squamate tree.

Allan Larson, Ted Townsend, D J Macey … (2004)

Squamate reptiles (snakes, lizards, and amphisbaenians) serve as model systems for evolutionary studies of a variety of morphological and behavioral traits, and phylogeny is crucial to many generalizations derived from such studies. Specifically, the traditional dichotomy between Iguania (anoles, iguanas, chameleons, etc.) and Scleroglossa (skinks, geckos, snakes, etc.) has been correlated with major evolutionary shifts within Squamata. We present a molecular phylogenetic study of 69 squamate species using approximately 4600 (2876 parsimony-informative) base pairs (bp) of DNA sequence data from the nuclear genes RAG-1(approximately 2750 bp) and c-mos(approximately 360 bp) and the mitochondrial ND2 region (approximately 1500 bp), sampling all major clades and most major subclades. Under our hypothesis, species previously placed in Iguania, Anguimorpha, and almost all recognized squamate families form strongly supported monophyletic groups. However, species previously placed in Scleroglossa, Varanoidea, and several other higher taxa do not form monophyletic groups. Iguania, the traditional sister group of Scleroglossa, is actually highly nested within Scleroglossa. This unconventional rooting does not seem to be due to long-branch attraction, base composition biases among taxa, or convergence caused by similar selective forces acting on nonsister taxa. Studies of functional tongue morphology and feeding mode have contrasted the similar states found in Sphenodon(the nearest outgroup to squamates) and Iguania with those of Scleroglossa, but our findings suggest that similar states in Sphenodonand Iguania result from homoplasy. Snakes, amphisbaenians, and dibamid lizards, limbless forms whose phylogenetic positions historically have been impossible to place with confidence, are not grouped together and appear to have evolved this condition independently. Amphisbaenians are the sister group of lacertids, and dibamid lizards diverged early in squamate evolutionary history. Snakes are grouped with iguanians, lacertiforms, and anguimorphs, but are not nested within anguimorphs.