Yale study: Connecticut once home to ancient lizard

NEW HAVEN — Connecticut was once home to a small reptile with a set of powerful jaws that has been identified as a new species, according to a new paper by Yale University researchers.

The reptile, named Colobops noviportensis, lived in the Jurassic period, 200 million years ago. It was small but featured outsized jaw muscles so it could bite through the tough armor of other beasts, according to a release.

“Colobops would have been a diminutive but plucky little beast, part of a little-known menagerie of small animals that lived among the first dinosaurs,” said Bhart-Anjan Bhullar, assistant professor and assistant curator in geology and geophysics at Yale, in the release.

Bhullar is senior author of the paper, published March 23 in the journal Nature Communications.

“Its tiny frame hid some big secrets,” Bhullar said. “Despite its lizard-like aspect, it is in fact an early branch-off of the lineage leading to dinosaurs and birds. Also, its little jaws could bite harder than anything else its size. Perhaps that big bite allowed it to feed on tough, armored prey impervious to weaker mouths.”

The Colobops fossil is a skull the size of a quarter found in 1965 in Meriden during roadwork. It was removed from storage at the Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History and a three-dimensional reconstruction was made. The research showed the specialized jaw that had not been seen in other fourlegged vertebrates.

“This project was a great example of the process of science,” said lead author Adam Pritchard, a former member of Bhullar’s lab who is now at the Smithsonian Institution, in the release. “The skull was initially discovered in the mid-1960s. In the 1990s, the skull was subject to initial study in which it was identified as a cousin of a modern lizard-like reptile called a tuatara. Our study ups the ante again, using advanced CT scanning and 3D modeling to reveal all kinds of new features of the skull. The features are very distinctive, allowing us to establish a new species.”

The species’ name derives from Novus Portus, a Latinized version of New Haven — a reference to the New Haven Arkose, a sedimentary geological formation.

Contributed photo / Yale University This series of images shows the reconstruction process researchers used for Colobops noviportensis, a small reptile with unusually large jaw muscles, which was discovered in Meriden in 1965.