A tiny jawbone pulled from a hillside in southern France has rewritten the history of one of the world’s rarest and most endangered reptiles.
Palaeontologists have identified a new genus and species of ancient lizard, named Acutodon villeveyracensis, from a fossilised upper jaw discovered near the town of Villeveyrac in the Hérault region. The specimen, just 2.8 centimetres long and lined with slender curved teeth, is 83 million years old — and it belongs to the same evolutionary lineage as the Chinese crocodile lizard, a living species so rare that only a few hundred individuals survive in the wild today.
The finding pushes the presence of that lineage in Europe back by at least 30 million years, closing a major gap in its fossil record that had puzzled researchers for decades.
The study was published on 20 May in the Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology by Dr. Olivier Jansen of the Université de Poitiers and colleagues.
The Chinese crocodile lizard (Shinisaurus crocodilurus) is among the most endangered reptiles on Earth. It clings to existence in small scattered populations along forest streams in southeastern China and northern Vietnam, threatened by habitat destruction, poaching for the illegal pet trade, and climate change. It is the sole surviving species of a once-wider group called pan-shinisaurs, and until now, the oldest known record of that group in Europe dated to roughly 50 million years ago.
Acutodon villeveyracensis changes that picture entirely.
The researchers confirmed its identity through a combination of anatomical features shared exclusively with living and fossil crocodile lizards — including distinctive tooth structures called resorption pits and a characteristic forward-set opening in the upper jaw bone. Using skull proportions from the living species as a reference, they estimated the ancient animal may have exceeded one metre in length, making it a sizeable predator in the warm, marshy floodplain it called home during the Late Cretaceous.
Its diet likely included fish, frogs, salamanders, and other small vertebrates, mirroring the hunting behaviour of its modern relative. The researchers note it would have shared its habitat with at least two other large lizard species, suggesting a more complex Late Cretaceous squamate community in what is now southern France than previously recognised.
The broader implication is that pan-shinisaurs were present across Europe far earlier than the fossil record had indicated, and that the group’s ancestors may have had a much wider geographic distribution before their eventual contraction to a single endangered species in a narrow strip of East Asia.
“While this species is currently on the brink of extinction, the evolutionary history of this group remains poorly understood, and the species could disappear before we untangle the mysteries of its origins,” Jansen said in a statement released by the journal’s publisher on 20 May 2026.
The fossil is permanently housed at the Université de Poitiers.
Sources
Jansen, O., et al. (2026). A new pan-shinisaur lizard (Anguimorpha) from the lower Campanian of Villeveyrac (Hérault, France). Journal of Vertebrate Paleontology. Published online 20 May 2026. https://doi.org/10.1080/02724634.2026.2636649
On the Chinese crocodile lizard’s conservation status: IUCN Red List — Shinisaurus crocodilurus: https://www.iucnredlist.org/species/20579/9213529
Quotes in this article are drawn from a press release issued by Taylor & Francis on 20 May 2026.
Jane holds a BSc in Biology from the University of Regina and a Master of Science in Bioscience, Technology and Public Policy from the Univesity of Winnipeg. Her reporting interests include Life Sciences, Physical Sciences and the Cosmos.