A tiny 99-million-year-old piece of amber from Myanmar, spotted in Tel Aviv University’s Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, reveals that lizards have been shedding their tails to escape danger since the Late Cretaceous, when dinosaurs still roamed the planet, The Times of Israel reported.
The Amber Specimen From Myanmar
The amber specimen measures just 18 millimeters, or 0.7 inches, across. Researchers originally thought the dark residue inside the stone was simply a small twig or an insect part. PhD candidate Dolev Fabrikant examined the piece under magnification and spotted tiny, overlapping scales instead.
To examine the opaque amber without damaging the unique specimen, Fabrikant and his supervisor Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou of the university’s Zoology School teamed up with Ahmed Nasser from the Agriculture Ministry’s Volcani Institute. Nasser performed advanced micro-CT scanning on the artifact. The resulting three-dimensional X-ray reconstructions exposed a symmetrical ring of tissue at the detachment point, matching the muscle rosettes found in living lizards that deliberately sever their tails.
The clean break lacked the crushing patterns typical of accidental injuries. This confirmed a deliberate release.
Dating Tail Autotomy to the Cretaceous Period
Previous research showed pre-formed fracture surfaces along lizard tails. However, this is the first time scientists have confirmed that lizard autotomy stretches back to the Late Cretaceous. Apostolos Christopoulos, a co-author from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, pointed out that although the detached tail cannot identify the precise species—with possibilities spanning from wall lizards to early monitor lizard relatives—the behavioral proof is indisputable.
Be it to escape a sticky trap of tree resin or to throw off an approaching predator, the specimen proves this survival strategy has persisted virtually unaltered across almost 100 million years. After detachment, lizard tails can keep moving for up to an hour to distract a predator while the tailless reptile scuttles to safety.
Publication in Palaeontologia Electronica
The research team published their findings in the peer-reviewed journal Palaeontologia Electronica.
