A newly discovered monstersaur roamed beneath the feet of giant dinosaurs. Paleontologists have described the new species as a giant Gila monster-like reptile, and bestowed on it a name fit for fantasy royalty.
The new species has been named Bolg amondol, which basically translates to “mound-headed goblin prince” in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish language.
“Bolg is a great sounding name. It’s a goblin prince from The Hobbit, and I think of these lizards as goblin-like, especially looking at their skulls,” says Hank Woolley, paleontologist at the Natural History Museum of Los Angeles County’s Dinosaur Institute.
Although Bolg‘s bones have been rattling around in museum drawers since 2006, the creature was only recently examined and described. The remains are a very fragmentary skeleton, but this was enough information for Woolley and team to identify it as a new species and place it in its evolutionary lineage.
Bolg is an early representative of Monstersauria, a clade of lizards that includes the Gila monster that still roams the region today. But where its modern counterparts can grow up to about 50 centimeters (20 inches) long, Bolg is estimated to have been much bigger.
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“Three feet tip to tail, maybe even bigger than that, depending on the length of the tail and torso,” says Woolley. “So by modern lizard standards, a very large animal, similar in size to a Savannah monitor lizard; something that you wouldn’t want to mess around with.”
Bolg‘s remains were discovered in Utah in the United States, dating back about 76 million years, during the tail end of the dinosaurs‘ reign. Intriguingly, however, its closest known relative was from Asia’s Gobi Desert on the other side of the world, indicating that dinosaurs weren’t the only creatures that managed to migrate across distant continents that were once connected.
The finding helps plug up some holes in the history of Monstersauria, but also fills out the roster of non-dinosaur reptiles that shared the planet with their famous cousins.
The research was published in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
