Lizards get a bad rap when it comes to their families: They lay their eggs and never look back. But that’s not the case for desert night lizards, which have been found investing time and energy in their young and forming families — a strategy that was thought exclusive to mammals and birds. «Birds, mammals and reptiles are so different in so many ways,» said Alison Davis, a postdoctoral researcher at the University of California at Berkeley. Reptiles aren’t even warm-blooded, she notes, yet here they are forming families just like their warmer cousins. |  |
 | The tracks, described in a report published Wednesday by the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B, push back the first appearance of this dinosaur lineage to about 250 million years ago. “They are the oldest fossils of the dinosaur lineage of any type anywhere in the world,” said Stephen Brusatte, a graduate student at Columbia University and lead author of the journal article. |
