The Wandering Lizard

After 76-million-year-old fossils were discovered at the Kaiparowits Formation in the Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in southern Utah in 2005, they were put in a jar labeled “lizard,” left in a museum, and forgotten. 

Twenty years later, however, a scientist specializing in lizard evolution saw the jar and peeked inside, shocked to realize those bones belonged to a previously undocumented species. 

“I opened this jar…and was like, oh wow, there’s a fragmentary skeleton here,” lead study author Hank Woolley said in a statement. “We know very little about large-bodied lizards from the Kaiparowits Formation in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, so I knew this was significant right away.” 

In a new study that followed that discovery, the scientists described the new species, named Bolg amondol after the goblin prince from J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit.” “I think of these lizards as goblin-like, especially looking at their skulls,” Woolley added. 

B. amondol is a species that originated within a group of large, sharp-toothed, armored lizards called monstersaurs that still exist today in the deserts where the lizard was found.

“Three feet tip to tail, maybe even bigger than that, depending on the length of the tail and torso,” Woolley said, describing what the lizard would have looked like. “So by modern lizard standards, a very large animal, similar in size to a Savannah monitor lizard – something that you wouldn’t want to mess around with.” 

The skeleton is less fragmented compared with most fossils from the Age of Dinosaurs. The team found tiny pieces of the skull, vertebrae, girdles, limbs, and the bony armor called osteoderms in the jar. 

“What’s really interesting about this holotype specimen of Bolg is that it’s fragmentary, yes, but we have a broad sample of the skeleton preserved,” Woolley said. “There’s no overlapping bones – there’s not two left hip bones or anything like that. So we can be confident that these remains likely belonged to a single individual.” 

The part of B. amondol’s skeleton that survived provides scientists with a great deal of information to study the species, especially considering that the fossil record of monstersauria is largely incomplete, despite their roughly 100-million-year history. 

This discovery also highlights the likelihood that there were many more types of big lizards in the Late Cretaceous Period. To date, scientists know of at least three types of predatory lizards that existed in the region that is modern-day southern Utah, according to Smithsonian Magazine. 

B. amondol’s closest known relative has been found on the other side of the planet, the Gobi Desert in Asia. While scientists have long known that dinosaurs roamed between the once-connected continents during the Late Cretaceous Period, between 66 and 100 million years ago, this new finding shows that smaller animals were also travelers.

The discovery also indicates that land vertebrates of different sizes shared common patterns in how they were distributed across continents at the time.