Amber gecko riddle

Amber often helps scientists by preserving unique living things for research. Most often, insects or small birds remain in the resin. But sometimes something truly unique comes into the hands of the researchers. As, for example, a piece of amber, in which the remains of a lizard with long fingers on it are preserved. How such a lizard found itself in sticky tar, and also where and when it happened, is a riddle worthy of Sherlock Holmes.

Mysterious gift

A unique 12-centimeter piece of amber with a lizard inside was donated to the Miller Museum of Geology at Queen's University of Ontario, Canada, back in the 1980s, but the person who did this did not report the age or origin of the artifact. Therefore, now the study begins almost from scratch.

To begin with, scientists analyzed the chemical composition of a piece of amber to prove that it is not a fake. They also analyzed isotopes of amber carbon and hydrogen, finding that amber is a hardened resin of a flowering tree or angiosperms. In addition, it was possible to establish that the tree (and the lizard inside amber) was in an area with a large amount of rainfall and refers to the Neogene period, which lasted from 23 million to 2.6 million years ago.

Call me spike

The next step concerned the lizard itself. The 7 cm long reptile most likely belongs to geckos, which showed a detailed 3D model of the anatomy of the animal, which the researchers created using high-resolution X-ray microscopy. Amber preserved the teeth of a lizard, ear bones and even flesh. In the coming months, scientists expect to study the anatomy of the gecko, hoping to fit it into the family tree of this species. While the lizard is called Spike.

But now it can be noted that Spike is different from modern geckos with short, thick fingers and sticky pads on their feet. However, the amber lizard has extremely long fingers. Scientists do not exclude that this may be due to the peculiarities of Spike's movement, as well as how the lizard was walled up in resin.