A chance encounter in a London museum has led to the identification of a new prehistoric species, thanks to the keen eye of paleontologist Victor Beccari. While examining reptile fossils at the city's Natural History Museum, Beccari noticed a skeleton that looked strikingly familiar. His memory of a similar fossil impression at Germany's Senckenberg National History Museum prompted him to connect the dots, and the halves. Nearly a century earlier, the original fossil slab had been split in two—the skeleton on one side, the impression of the skeleton on the other—and sold separately, likely to turn a profit, per Smithsonian.
"As they didn't tell either buyer that there was another half, the connection between the two fossils had been lost until now," Beccari says in a museum statement. By reuniting these pieces, Beccari and his colleagues discovered they were looking at a 145-million-year-old rhynchocephalian, now named Sphenodraco scandentis. This small lizard-like reptile, which lived during the time of the dinosaurs, is part of a lineage now represented only by the tuatara, New Zealand's biggest reptile. Unlike its relatives, S. scandentis appears to have been specialized for life in the trees, making it the oldest known arboreal member of its kind.
The fossil emerged from Germany's Solnhofen Limestone, a renowned late Jurassic fossil site. Many similar fossils from the region were once lumped into broad categories based only on limb length, leading to misidentifications; careful analysis showed that S. scandentis' distinctive features, particularly its teeth and hips, set it apart from previously catalogued species. The find, published in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society, highlights the potential for new discoveries tucked away in museum drawers—as Beccari notes, revisiting old specimens with modern methods may reveal that other presumed species actually mask greater diversity.
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