New research has uncovered a species of hook-toothed lizard that lived about 167 million years ago and has a confusing set of features seen in snakes and geckos—two very distant relatives. One of the ...

Pythons and anacondas are undeniably massive snakes, capable of reaching lengths and girths that make them some of the heaviest reptiles alive today. But even these modern giants pale in comparison to ...

For the more than 242 million years that lizards and snakes appear in the fossil record, they show up mostly as pieces of lizard jaws and snake vertebrae. Exactly why these parts survive as fossils ...

Introduction: Seeing and knowing -- Ancient snakes, modern snakes: "what is a snake?" -- Ancient snake lizards: the fossil record -- The anatomy of ancient snake lizards -- Ancient snake lizard ...

The fossil was recovered from the Chiting Formation, a geological deposit in southwestern Taiwan formed roughly 800,000 to 400,000 years ago during the Pleistocene epoch. Cheng-Hsiu Tsai of National ...

Nearly 100 million years ago, snakes weren’t the sleek, limbless creatures we know today—they still had hind legs and even a cheekbone that has almost vanished in modern species. A remarkably ...

A single vertebra pulled from ancient sediments in southwest Taiwan has upended what scientists thought they knew about the island’s prehistoric ecosystem. The bone belongs to a giant python that ...

The Isle of Skye holds the key to ancient species. From the Elgol dinosaur to the Krusatodon or the world’s largest pterosaur fossil from the Jurassic period, fossils found here have shaped our ...

The global fossil record of squamates, which includes lizards, mosasaurs, snakes, and amphisbaenians (A) is overwhelmingly incomplete, with most fossil species containing less than 20% of the totality ...