The "mother of all lizards" is believed to have slithered around Italy more than 240 years ago, researchers said after using new scans on fossils initially found two decades ago, according to the website Live Science.
Paleontologists said that updated scans of the tiny reptile fossil Megachirella wachtleri revealed features in the fossil that were hidden, allowing them to declare it as the oldest known ancestor in the squamate lineage.
The lineage is the reptile group that includes lizards and snakes, and the "mother of all lizards" is believed to be a direct ancestor of about 10,000 species alive today, Live Science said. Researchers believe that Megachirella predates the fossils previously thought to belong to the earliest squamates by around 75 million years.
Researchers said that the findings closed the gap between the oldest known squamates and the estimated origins of this reptile group derived from molecular data, according to Live Science.
"It deserved further attention — especially in the form of CT [computed tomography] scanning — to provide greater anatomical details and an improved data set, to understand its placement in the evolutionary tree of reptiles," the study's lead study author Tiago Simões, a doctoral candidate in biological sciences at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, Canada, told Live Science.
The University of Alberta said in a statement that the fossil was found 20 years ago in the Dolomite Mountains, a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Heritage Site in northern Italy.
Initially, researchers believed that the fossils were linked to, but not an ancestor of, modern lizards and snakes. The new study by Simoes and an international team from the university, Italy and Australia determined it was indeed related.
The research, which was detailed Wednesday in the journal Nature, included CT scans, photographs and molecular analysis collected by Simoes and Michael Caldwell, a paleontologist at the university. Simoes and Caldwell combined their work with other researchers to come up with their findings, the university said.
"Fossils are our only accurate window into the ancient past," Caldwell, a coauthor of the study, said in the university's statement. "Our new understanding of Megachirella is one point in ancient time, but it tells us things about the evolution of lizards that we simply cannot learn from any of the species of lizards and snakes alive today."
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