A lizard making a dramatic escape, leaving its tail wriggling behind as it darts to safety, is an image familiar to many. Tail-shedding is one of the most widespread defenses against predators among living lizards, yet tracing the origins of this extraordinary ability has proved to be surprisingly difficult\u2014how can we tell when this escape tactic first arose in lizards?<\/p>\n
A new Tel Aviv University study has found answers to this enigma inside a piece of amber just 18 millimeters (0.7 inches) long\u2014the size of a fingertip\u2014discovered in northern Myanmar. Trapped within it is a lizard\u2019s tail that detached from its body approximately 99 million years ago. According to the researchers, it represents the best-preserved direct fossil evidence of a voluntarily dropped lizard tail through a defensive mechanism known as autotomy.<\/p>\n
The study was led by Dolev Fabrikant, a Ph.D. candidate at Tel Aviv University\u2019s New Environmental School, and his supervisor, Dr. Leonidas-Romanos Davranoglou of the university\u2019s School of Zoology and Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, in collaboration with researchers from the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens and Israel\u2019s Volcani Institute. The findings are published<\/a> in Palaeontologia Electronica.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A lizard making a dramatic escape, leaving its tail wriggling behind as it darts to safety, is an image familiar to many. Tail-shedding is one of the most widespread defenses against predators among living lizards, yet tracing the origins of this extraordinary ability has proved to be surprisingly difficult\u2014how can we tell when this escape [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":630,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-245972","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-education"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245972","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/630"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=245972"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/245972\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=245972"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=245972"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=245972"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}