In North America, skinks are often tiny, slick and snakelike — with shiny blue tails or bright red heads. Nearly all of them can fit in the palm of your hand. But more than 47,000 years ago, an armored tank of a skink walked the desert lands of Australia.
“It was nicknamed ‘megachunk’ or ‘chunksaurus,’” due to the thickness of its bones, says Kailah Thorn, a paleontologist at the Western Australia Museum who recently described the species for the first time. “It’s a pretty heavy metal lizard.”
Thorn and her colleagues only just identified the species Tiliqua frangens this June, in a study published in Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences. But the bones of the creatures themselves were discovered long before — then subsequently forgotten.
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