Will Global Warming Super-Size Lizards? Berkeley Fossils Offer Clues

Jurassic Park was fiction, but the world may yet see a return of big lizards enlarged by global warming, according to a new study of reptile fossils that have been sitting for decades in a UC Berkeley museum.

Among the fossils at Cal's Museum of Paleontology are jaw bones from a giant vegetarian lizard found in the 1970s in what is now Burma, or Myanmar. The 10-foot-long creature lived during a warmer epoch 40 million years ago when there was no ice at the poles and more carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

The scientific review "suggests that a warm climate helps these cold-blooded animals grow larger, and that some reptiles may grow larger as global temperatures continue to rise," according to a campus news release.

The species has been named Barbaturex morrisoni in honor the late Doors singer Jim Morrison, who was nicknamed the "Lizard King."

The study – published last month in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B – raises the question of whether, say, iguanas could grow as big as Komodo dragons, according to the UC announcement. 

"We think the warm climate during that period of time allowed the evolution of a large body size and the ability of plant-eating lizards to successfully compete in mammal faunas," said lead researcher Jason Head, a vertebrate paleontologist at  the University of Nebraska at Lincoln.

Head, who was quoted in a University of Nebraska news release, worked on the fossils with Patricia Holroyd, a paleontologist at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Paleontology, and Gregg Gunnell of Duke University and Russell Ciochon of the University of Iowa.

Holroyd was quoted saying, "What’s cool is that this is an example of gigantism in herbivorous lizards, which tells us that if you’re a reptile and vegetarian, you have to have a warm environment.”

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