Amber Fossil Reveals Ancient Lizard's Tail-Shedding Defense

A fossilized lizard tail preserved in mid-Cretaceous amber from Myanmar retains skin and muscle tissue. The find offers direct evidence that lizards were already shedding their tails to escape predators roughly 99 million years ago. The specimen is kept in a public research collection at the Steinhardt Museum of Natural History, Tel Aviv University.

The amber came from a mine in Myanmar’s Hukawng valley, Kachin state. Researchers used X-ray micro-computed tomography to inspect the tail and compare it with tails from living skinks and lizards. The scans revealed a ring of muscle around the break, arranged like a rosette or wedge—a pattern seen when modern lizards contract muscles to deliberately drop a tail.

The tail likely belonged to a monitor-lizard relative or a lacertid, the group containing European wall lizards. The team proposed two ways it could have become trapped: a tree-dwelling lizard stuck in resin escaped by shedding its tail, or a predator grabbed the lizard, which lost the tail during the struggle and it fell onto the sticky surface.

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