Local prehistoric lizard’s ‘siblings’ found in Alps
Was Iberia connected to Switzerland via the sea?
STUDIES of a prehistoric marine reptile discovered a few years ago in Cehegín (Murcia) have revealed it to be similar to others in the Swiss Alps, indicting a possible connection by sea between this part of the Iberian Peninsula and central Europe in the Triassic Period, between 247 and 237 million years ago.
The research was coordinated by lecturers Fernando and Juan Alberto Pérez-Valera of Alicante university (UA) earth and environmental sciences department.
The UA explained that the remains, which are the most complete and oldest from south-east Spain, were discovered by chance in a wall in the old quarter of the town in 2018, but the researchers’ fieldwork managed to find the rock formation they came from and describe the creature in detail.
It would have measured just over 40 centimetres and appears to have been articulated with anatomically connected bones, said Fernando PérezValera.
“It would have looked similar to a modern lizard, but it wasn’t really a lizard, but belonged to a line of marine reptiles that adapted to the marine environment early, in an era just before the appearance of the dinosaurs,” he explained.
The paper, published in the palaeontology magazine ‘Lethaia’, contains new and interesting data about the marine connections at the time when the supercontinent Pangea was starting to fragment.
The reptile from Cehegín is comparable to remains found on Monte San Giorgio, in Switzerland by the border with Italy, indicating that marine corridors may have enabled organisms like this to disperse.
It belongs to the order Eosauropterygia, a subgroup of the superorder Sauropterygia (meaning lizard flippers), and is the most complete sauropterygian yet found from the Middle Triassic epoch in the Baetic System of mountain ranges in Spain. This reveals that the diversity and distribution of these reptiles was greater than previously thought, noted the researcher.
The remains are on display to the public at the Cehegín museum of archaeology.
Soon the researchers will reveal the results of new studies about the characteristics of the
marine environment the reptile inhabited and at what depth, and they will continue looking into how it was conserved, amongst other questions.