Sometimes the best discoveries are hiding in plain sight—like in a museum jar labeled “lizard.”
When researcher Hank Woolley opened an unassuming jar at the Natural History Museum of Utah (NHMU), he re-examined a specimen collected in 2005 and realized it was a new species. The creature, a raccoon-sized armored predator that roamed southern Utah 76 million years ago, was named Bolg amondol after the goblin prince in Tolkien’s The Hobbit. The discovery is reshaping what scientists know about ancient lizard diversity.
“I opened this jar of bones labeled ‘lizard’ at the Natural History Museum of Utah and was like, oh wow, there’s a fragmentary skeleton here,” says Woolley, from the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s Dinosaur Institute. “We know very little about large-bodied lizards from the Kaiparowits Formation in Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument in Utah, so I knew this was significant right away.”
The discovery, published in Royal Society Open Science, reveals that at least three types of large predatory lizards prowled the subtropical landscape alongside dinosaurs—far more diversity than scientists previously imagined.
“Discovering a new species of lizard that is an ancestor of modern Gila monsters is pretty cool in and of itself, but what’s particularly exciting is what it tells us about the unique 76-million-year-old ecosystem it lived in,” says co-author Randy Irmis, professor of geology and geophysics at the U.
At three feet long, Bolg would have been formidable—“something that you wouldn’t want to mess around with,” notes Woolley. Its closest relative lived in Asia’s Gobi Desert, suggesting these monster lizards traveled between continents just like their dinosaur contemporaries.
I’m so glad we have a diversity of topics in science. I may not study reptiles, but it is always great to hear about large lizards, black holes, and all the other things that are so far removed from Mechanical Engineering. I agree that a 3-foot-long lizard would not have been very fun to reside with!