DUKE / UC BERKELEY (US) — One of the biggest known lizards to ever live on land roamed tropical forests alongside mammals some 40 million years ago.
The “Lizard King”—named after The Doors singer Jim Morrison—was almost six feet long and weighed about 60 pounds. The lizard (Barbaturex morrisoni) competed with mammals in the forests of Southeast Asia for food and other resources.
A team of US paleontologists, led by Jason Head of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln, describes fossils of the giant lizard from Myanmar this week in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B.