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AN “INVASIVE” LIZARD THAT BEAT US HERE BY 5 MILLION YEARS You know those giant lizards in Florida everyone blames for wrecking the ecosystem? Turns out, they may have seniority. A half-inch fossil vertebra sat in a museum drawer for 20 years before scientists used AI to prove it belonged to a tegu — a 5-foot-long South American lizard — that lived in Georgia 5 million years ago during a prehistoric heatwave. That flips the script: Tegus aren’t just modern escapees from the pet trade — they’re ancient migrants who swam to North America when sea levels were higher and Florida was mostly underwater. The fossil didn’t match any living tegu, so scientists named it a whole new species: Wautaugategu formidus, after the nearby Wautauga forest and the Latin for “warm.” Why? Because these lizards likely showed up during the Middle Miocene Climatic Optimum, one of the hottest periods in Earth’s history. They didn’t last. As the planet cooled, the tegus likely couldn’t reproduce — their eggs require heat to hatch — and they vanished. This discovery happened thanks to AI and a museum’s 3D vertebrate scan project, which let scientists compare the fossil’s shape with over 100 modern vertebrae without touching a single bone.