An excavation at a former quarry site in Germany uncovered a rather unique set of fossils: beetle, inside a lizard, inside a snake– giving scientists a well-preserved glimpse inside the ancient food chain.
The discovery, dubbed a “nesting doll” fossil by National Geographic due to its similarity to the Russian dolls of increasingly small size, each placed inside one other, was made by a team led by Dr. Krister Smith, a paleontologist from the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt.
Dr. Smith and his colleagues unearthed the 48-million-year-old fossil in the Messel Pit, which at the time would have been “a volcanic lake with toxic deep waters and a… knack for belching out asphyxiating clouds of carbon dioxide,” according to Nat Geo. Shortly after eating the lizard, the snake died and was washed into the water, where it was preserved in sediments.
The newfound food-chain fossil is only the second of its kind to ever be discovered, and a paper detailing the find and its subsequent analysis using high-resolution computer tomography or CT scans was published last month in the journal Palaeobiodiversity and Palaeoenvironments.
Credit: Krister T. Smith
Rare discovery provides new insights into ancient food chain
The “nesting doll” fossil – more accurately known as a tripartite food chain fossil – is the first to have been discovered at the Messel site. The only other such specimen was shark whose stomach contained an amphibian that had previously consumed a spiny fish, discovered back in 2008 by a University of Vienna researcher named Jürgen Kriwet, according to Nat Geo.
In an interview with the publication, Dr. Smith said that it was “probably the kind of fossil that I will go the rest of my professional life without ever encountering again.” Jason Head, curator of vertebrate paleontology at the University of Cambridge (who was not involved in the study) said that it was “a very cool thing” to have discovered.
CT scans conducted by the team allowed the researchers to identify the species of both the snake and the lizard, the Institute explained in a statement. The fossilized serpent was a member of the species Palaeophython fischeri, an extinct tree-dwelling snake related to modern-day boas, while the lizard was Geiseltaliellus maarius, an extinct type of lizard similar to an iguana.
Measuring just a little over 100 centimeters in length, the snake was significantly smaller than most other members of its species (which can grow to be more than 2 meters in size) and is thus believed to have been a juvenile. The lizard, on the other hand, measures about 20 centimeters in size from heat to tail, and is clearly encased in the snake’s ribs, indicating that it was within the serpent and had obviously been consumed by the predatory reptile.
Unfortunately, the identity of the beetle remains a mystery, as the researchers said that it was not well-preserved enough to determine its species. However, the fact that the lizard’s stomach had a beetle in it at all is a big deal, as all of the reptiles previously discovered at the Messel site had stomachs filled exclusively with plants. The find indicates that this lizard was an omnivore.
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Image credit: Kristier T. Smith
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