Fossil discovery reveals giant worm lizard with snail-cracking jaws
An international team of researchers has discovered a new fossil worm lizard species in Tunisia. Terastiodontosaurus marcelosanchezi is the largest known species of the Amphisbaenia group, with a skull length of over five ...
The work is published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.
Unlike today's predominantly subterranean worm lizards, this species may also have been a surface dweller. The fossil shows extreme dental features, including strong jaws and a specialized tooth enamel, which indicate that it fed on snails—a diet that has persisted for over 56 million years.
The worm lizards (Amphisbaenia) are aptly named, since at first glance these scaly reptiles resemble a worm with a head at both ends. However, what recalls a creature from Greek mythology is actually an evolutionary trick: worm lizards can crawl both forwards and backwards with their blunt, rounded tail ends.
Among other things, they use their body shape, which is reminiscent of an earthworm, to wriggle through narrow passages in the ground that they dig themselves.
An international team led by Prof. Dr. Georgios L. Georgalis from the Institute of Systematics and Evolution of Animals at the Polish Academy of Sciences, Krakow, with researchers from the Senckenberg Research Institute and Natural History Museum in Frankfurt, the Institut des Sciences de l'Évolution de Montpellier, the Muséum national d'Histoire naturelle in Paris, and the National Office of Mines in Tunis, has now described a previously unknown fossil species from the group of worm lizards in a new study.
The newly discovered worm lizard species is the largest in the world. Presumably, the animals fed mainly on snails 50 million years ago. Credit: Jaime Chirinos
The researchers found the fossilised remains of Terastiodontosaurus marcelosanchezi—shown here is the upper jaw of the animal—in Djebel Chambi National Park in Tunisia. Credit: Georgios Georgalis