A research team from the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Comenius University discovers a new species of prehistoric gecko
Knowledge of the evolution of animals on our continent has been expanded. An international team consisting of reptile experts from the U.S., France, and Slovakia discovered and described a new species of prehistoric gecko. In 2023, a paper about the discovery was published in the prestigious international journal Acta Palaeontologica Polonica.
"Our research focused on the fossil remains of a gecko from the Lower Eocene in France. It is 50 million years old and comes from a period popularly known as the Early Tertiary. This gecko represents a hitherto unknown new genus," said Andrej Čerňanský from the Department of Ecology of the Faculty of Natural Sciences of Comenius University, the team member from Slovakia. The researchers named the new species Bauersaurus, in honour of the U.S. herpetologist Aaron Bauer.
The global climate at the time Bauersaurus lived was very warm, the warmest in the last 200 million years. On most continents, the forests were similar to those of South America. There was no ice at the poles, and ocean levels were higher. At that time, Europe was an archipelago and many areas were flooded by sea.
Bauersaurus was not like any of today’s geckos or other known geckos from the Tertiary. On the contrary, its morphology strongly resembles the Jurassic gecko from the Solnhofen area in Germany, where the well-known Archaeopteryx and other pterosaurs were found.
"It has many primitive features that are not found in today's representatives of these reptiles. We were surprised to find some signs in a younger gecko from the Eocene, although these two geckos are separated by more than 100 million years and especially by the well-known mass extinction at the end of the Mesozoic. It was during this extinction event that non-avian dinosaurs, pterosaurs and ammonites became extinct. The event also had a pronounced negative impact on scaly reptiles, i.e. lizards, such as geckos. The find from France suggests that one archaic line of geckos survived this extinction event and co-existed in Europe with more modern geckos 50 million years ago," Andrej Čerňanský explains why the discovery is unique.
It makes the evolution of these iconic lizards, which can run on walls and even glass, much more interesting than previously thought.