by Steve Smith, University of Nebraska-Lincoln, Duke University
June 12, 2013 (TSR) – One of the biggest known lizards to ever live on land roamed tropical forests alongside mammals some 40 million years ago.
The “Lizard King”—named after The Doors singer Jim Morrison—was almost six feet long and weighed about 60 pounds. The lizard (Barbaturex morrisoni) competed with mammals in the forests of Southeast Asia for food and other resources.
A team of US paleontologists, led by Jason Head of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, describes fossils of the giant lizard from Myanmar this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
The lizard provides new and important clues on the evolution of plant-eating reptiles and their relationship to global climate and competition with mammals.
Shrinking lizards
In today’s world, plant-eating lizards like iguanas and agamids are much smaller than large mammal herbivores. The largest lizards, like the giant, carnivorous Komodo Dragon, are limited to islands that are light on mammal predators.
It’s not known, however, if lizards are limited in size by competition with mammals, or by temperatures of modern climates, Head says.
But B. morrisoni lived in an ecosystem with a diversity of both herbivorous and carnivorous mammals during a warm age in the earth’s history—36 to 40 million years ago—when there was no ice at the poles and atmospheric carbon dioxide levels were very high.
The creature was larger than most of the mammals with which it lived, suggesting that competition or predation by mammals did not restrict its evolution into a giant.
“We think the warm climate during that period of time allowed the evolution of a large body size and the ability of plant-eating lizards to successfully compete in mammal faunas,” Head says.
“You can’t fully understand the evolution of ecosystems in the modern world without looking at the ones that preceded them,” he adds. “We would’ve never known this by looking at lizards today. By going back in time using the fossil record, we can find unique information on the origin of modern ecosystems.”
Head worked with Patricia Holroyd of University of California, Berkeley; Gregg Gunnell of Duke University; and Russell Ciochon of the University of Iowa on identifying and analyzing B. morrisoni.
‘That’s neat’
It was a discovery millions of years and then a few extra decades in the making. Fossils of the giant lizard, which were originally found by Ciochon and colleagues in the 1970s in Myanmar, were unstudied in the University of California Museum of Paleontology until a few years ago, when Head and Holroyd began looking into them.
When Head first examined the fossils, he noticed the creature’s bones were characteristic of a group of modern lizards that includes bearded dragons, chameleons, and plant eaters like spiny-tailed lizards.
“I thought, ‘That’s neat. Based on its teeth, it’s a plant-eating lizard from a time period and a place from which we don’t have a lot of information.’ But when I started studying its modern relatives, I realized just how big this lizard was. It struck me that we had something here that was quite large, and quite unique,” says Head.
Jim Morrison
He noticed another telltale sign: ridges on the underside of the jaw that strongly suggested it supported soft tissues, much like the multicolored chin flaps and dewlaps that give some modern lizards a bearded appearance.
The giant lizard’s genus name, Barbaturex, means “bearded king.”
“I was listening to The Doors quite a bit during the research,” Head says. “Some of their musical imagery includes reptiles and ancient places, and Jim Morrison was of course The Lizard King, so it all kind of came together.”
Head says the discovery of B. morrisoni now leads to other big questions: For how long do these giant lizards persist in the fossil record? How far and wide did they disperse across the planet? What are the relationships of the evolution of reptile body sizes to changes in global temperature throughout history?
And the obvious question: Does a warming climate mean giant reptiles will someday return?
Lizard King comeback?
If we were to raise global temperatures at a natural pace and preserve natural, healthy habitats, we could end up with the evolution of giant lizards, turtles, snakes, and crocodiles, says Head.
“But we’re changing the atmosphere so fast that the rate of climate change is probably faster than most biological systems can adapt to. So instead of seeing the growth and spread of giant reptiles, what you might see is extinction,” he says.
Meanwhile, the researchers will consider how the clues provided by B. morrisoni can be used to reconstruct global temperature over geologic time periods.
“That becomes very important in modeling what temperature change will be like across the surface of the planet in the future,” Head adds. “And that, obviously, bears directly on our own health.”
