A recent discovery in Saxony of a perfectly petrified tree-dwelling lizard shows that lizards came well before the dinoosaurs. The animal resembles the modern day Green Iguana, but is currently being dated to the Permian period between 300 million and 250 million years ago.

“Most other reptiles lived on the ground,” (Jörg Schneider, professor of palaeontology at Freiberg University) told The Local. “For the first time we really know this animal was specialized for living in trees … They have unusually long and slim fingers and very long tails … It is a completely new form that is unknown.”

The Permian period was marked by the diversification of land vertebrates and appearance of modern trees such as conifers. All of the modern continents were clumped together in the single supercontinent, Pangea.

Mammal ancestors such as the famous fan-backed Dimetrodon flourished but the period ended with a massive extinction 250 million years ago that wiped out about 70 percent of land vertebrates, probably through a combination of climate change, volcanic activity and asteroid strikes.

The petrified forest on the outskirts Chemnitz is remarkably intact because it was buried in fine ash from a nearby volcano eruption. Normally such fossil remains of animals have been washed some distance from where they lived and died and then preserved in lakes and sediments, Schneider said.

The Chemnitz forest, by contrast, has been preserved virtually as it stood 290 million years ago, complete with trees, insects, spiders and snails as well as larger vertebrate animals. The reptiles were found at the foot of the trees from which they fell.

“You could call it the Pompeii of Saxony,” Schneider said. “They are exceptionally well-preserved skeletons because of this very fine ash. We could see every bone, we could see the outline of the skin and beautifully preserved scales. It looks like they just died days ago.”

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