Scientists Find the World’s Oldest Chameleon-Like Tongue Preserved in Amber
via Smithsonian
The discovery, described today in Science, comes from a literal window into the ancient past. Fossilization in amber—or hardened tree sap—often preserves details that might otherwise rot away. The amber deposits of Myanmar, in particular, contain a vast array of Cretaceous creatures that lived in a 99 million-year-old forest, among them albanerpetontids. Three different fossils indicate that albies were not creatures that lived low to the ground, as previous fossils indicated, but crawled through the trees and nabbed insects with sticky tongues that could shoot out like projectiles.
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