Anole in amber--but how old?
The fossil record of anoles is disappointingly small. Other than very young (a few thousand years old) fossils found in caves, where owls and other predators may have left them, only four full-fledged fossils are known from the scientific literature. All are lizards preserved in amber, approximately 20 million years old (give or take a few million). Here’s a picture of one here.
But there are a lot more in private hands. The problem, however, is Jurassic Park. Remember how the mad scientists got their dinosaur DNA? They extracted it from mosquitoes entombed in amber. And where did the amber come from? Perhaps you recall the scene of the lawyer (later justifiably devoured by T. rex) getting off a river raft to purchase some amber. Where? The Dominican Republic. And it turns out that those amber mines do exist, only their deposits date to the Miocene, not the Cretaceous. And, more importantly, as well as skeeters and other invertebrates, occasionally an anole-laden piece of amber emerges from these mines.
