Always lead with your most interesting image. The fossil here is the thin orange slab of siltstone underneath my magnificent Komodo Dragon model.
Here is the slab itself. On the far right and the far left you can see two fossil footprints from both sides of some ancient reptile. The plastic Komodo Dragon just happens to fit these prints in size and shape, but they certainly weren’t made by an actual Komodo Dragon. I found this rock in the Spring Mountains of southern Nevada while doing my doctoral dissertation fieldwork decades ago. It is from the Lower Permian of the massive Bird Spring Formation (which is almost a mile thick). The footprints had nothing to do with my work (I was concentrating on the Carboniferous part of the formation), so I kept this little slab as a memento at home.
These tracks, a kind of trace fossil, belong to the ichnogenus Dromopus based on the slender nature of the elongated toes. Dromopus has been attributed to an araeoscelid reptile, which looked and apparently lived very much like a modern lizard.
Araeoscelis is one of the earliest diapsid reptiles, a group that has two distinctive holes (temporal fenestrae) on the sides of its skull. Diapsids are the most common type of reptile today, including crocodiles, lizards, snakes and dinosaurs. This genus was small, growing only to about 50 cm, and apparently predatory on insects and other arthropods. (Image from Smokeybjb via Wikipedia.)
Again, my friendly Komodo Dragon is only a stand-in for the Permian tracemaker, but he does have a nice pose to fit the tracks of his ancestral cousin!
References:
Haubold, H. and Lucas, S.G. 2003. Tetrapod footprints of the Lower Permian Choza Formation at Castle Peak, Texas. Paläontologische Zeitschrift 77: 247-261.
Hunt, A.P. and Lucas, S.G. 2006. Permian tetrapod ichnofacies. Geological Society, London, Special Publications 265: 137-156.
Hunt, A.P., Lucas, S.G., Lockley, M.G., Haubold, H. and Braddy, S. 1995. Tetrapod ichnofacies in Early Permian red beds of the American Southwest. New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science Bulletin 6: 295-301.
Lucas, S.G. 2002. Global Permian tetrapod footprint biostratigraphy and biochronology. Permophiles 41: 30-34.
