Enigmatic Lizards somehow survived near Chicxulub asteroid influence

A small, secret group of lizards still exists today may have been the only territory vertebrates that survived near Chicxulub Asteroid collision, which led to the eradication of the non-Advisor dinosaurs.

It has long been known that the Xantusiid Night company is an old lineage that is lasting for tens of thousands of millions of years. But Chase Brownstein at Yale University and his colleagues suspected that group may have actually arisen earlier than previously assumed: during the chalk period, which ended about 66 million years ago.

The end of chalk was characterized by a giant asteroid strike near the Yucatán Peninsula in Mexico City, which left a crater over 150 kilometers wide and caused the eradication of most of animal and plant species worldwide.

Today, night lizards are found a moulomer as they are not nukly nocturnal-staddy found in Cuba, Central America and southwest of the United States.

Brownstein and his team used previously published DNA sequence data for xantusiides to create an evolutionary tree for the group. They combined this with skeleton anatomy across Living and Fossil Night Lizards, enabling the team to decide how old their descent is, and estimate how many offspring the ancestors’ night lizards would have produced.

They found that the latest joint ancestor of living Xantusiides appeared deep in chalk, over 93 million years ago, and they probably had links of one or two offspring.

“I think it is very possible that these old populations were so close or closer to the impact than them today,” says Brownstein. “It’s almost as if Xantutsiid -Distribution outlines a circle around the impact.”

Based on fossil evidence, the old night lizard is unlikely to become simple, re -colonized the region later, says Brownstein.

“We know from our reconstructions that the common ancestor of living species almost certainly lived in North America, where the fossil register of Xantusiids is pretty much continuous on each side of the border with the effect,” he says.

Many night -lizard species live in cliffs, and their slow metabolisms can be compared to other survivors of the mass extinction, such as turtles and crocodiles. “This might have allowed them to take shelter under the influence and its immondal demand,” says Brownstein.

Nathan Lo at the University of Sydney says the lizards are remarkable. “They lived in the region around the impact point of the asteroid, [yet] They succeeded in surviving, even though the asteroid would have wiped out organs, which we within the Hunter of kilometers of the impact point.

They managed this despite not having many of the usual features that we will see in the survivors of mass exterminations. “The species that tend to survive through these extermination events are those that are small in size are quickly reproducing and having large geographical intervals,” says LO. “But these lizards generally reproduce slowly and see that they have quite small intervals.”