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At first, Megachirella didn’t appear to offer much insight.

The specimen was found by an amateur fossil hunter in 1999 in an outcrop of limestone in the Dolomite mountains of northern Italy. The slab, which dated to the middle Triassic Period, contained the front half of a small, slightly squashed skeleton with a large head and heavy forelimbs.

The remains were beautifully articulated, but somewhat hard to make out. When scientists formally named it in 2003, they described it as a primitive lepidosaur. Available technology wasn’t sufficient to probe deeper.

But in 2014, Dr. Simões — who specializes in untangling the evolutionary history of living and extinct squamates — came across a paper on the fossil that caught his interest. Looking at the anatomical figures, he knew right away that he was likely looking at a lizard — and a very early lizard.

Image An artist's rendering of Megachirella, which was probably just a few inches long. Credit... Davide Bonadonna

He contacted one of the paper’s authors, Massimo Bernardi, a paleontologist at the Museum of Science in Trento, Italy, and suggested that they run the fossil through high-resolution micro CT scanning in order to better see the compressed bones. Dr. Bernardi, who had been thinking along similar lines, agreed.

Under the high-tech gaze of the scanners, the scientists were able to digitally reconstruct the small crushed bones, picking out fine details of anatomy invisible to the naked eye. They found that portions of the animal’s braincase more closely resembled that of a modern iguana than those of other Triassic reptiles; so did the arrangement of teeth and the lack of perforations in the lower part of Megachirella’s vertebrae.