A Greek discovery from 50 million years ago

In the spring of 2022, Georgios Georgalis, an associate professor of paleontology at the Academy of Sciences in Krakow, Poland, was invited to France by the University of Montpellier to examine fossils from a large excavation.

The findings had come from Tunisia's Chambi National Park, and the Montpellier team of paleontologists asked the Greek expert, who specializes in Cenozoic reptiles, to investigate whether he could find any mammals from his own field among the fossils.

"I was very happy to find that there were many reptiles among them," says Georgalis, describing how he managed to arrive at the discovery of the Terastiodontosaurus marcelosanchezi, a 50-million-year-old lizard, on which he and his colleagues published recently in the Zoological Journal of the Linnean Society.

"Internationally, in our science we choose to give Greek names to the vast...