In honor of my grandmother. In the USA, scientists found the ancestor of geckos and gave him an unusual name
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Paleontologists at Yale University have identified a new fossil lizard that they believe was the ancestor of modern geckos.
The species was named after the grandmother of lead study author Dalton Meyer, Yale News reports.
The species Helioscopos dickersonae lived in North America at the end of the Jurassic period, 100 million years earlier than other gecko relatives.
“This discovery resulted from a larger study of two fossil lizard skulls from Dinosaur National Monument in Utah.”said Dalton Meyer, a graduate student in the Department of Earth and Planetary Sciences at Yale University.
The discovery of a new species indicates that the ancestors of geckos appeared in North America much earlier than previously thought.
Meyer named the new species “Helioscopos dickersonae”. The first part of the word roughly translates as “watcher of the sun”.
And “dickersonae” is a name in honor of the researcher’s grandmother, Helen Dickerson, who was the first curator of herpetology at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.
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| Photo: bp1181dy.gmail.com/Depositphotos |
Scientists currently know little about the fate of the gecko’s “ancestor” in North America, but Yale University says it died out some 90 million years after arriving on the continent.
Unlike modern geckos, Helioscopos dickersonae was not nocturnal. It had a prominent cone-shaped opening at the top of its head, which many lizard species use to sense sunlight.
This species probably looked similar to striped geckos or leopard geckos, as it did not have sticky “pads” on the toes.
Despite this, Helioscopos dickersonae could skillfully climb trees, the researcher suggests.
We will remind, earlier in Portugal, a rare spider was found, which had not been seen for 92 years.
Read also: Scientists have named a new species of frog after eco-activist Greta Thunberg
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