Aug 27, 2015 07:28 AM EDT By Russell Westerholm, UniversityHerald Reporter

A team of scientists that identified an ancient lizard they described as the "missing link" to modern iguanas.

According to NBC News, Gueragama sulamericana lived some 80 million years ago and could connect "Old World" lizards that live in Europe, Asia, and Africa to modern iguanas that live almost exclusively in South and Central America, as well as the southern United States.

The researchers' study is published in the journal Nature Communications.

"The roughly 1700 species of iguanas are almost without exception restricted to the New World, primarily the Southern United States down to the tip of South America," study co-author Michael Caldwell, biological sciences professor from the University of Alberta, said in a press release. "This fossil is an 80 million year old specimen of an acrodontan in the New World.

"It's a missing link in the sense of the paleobiogeography and possibly the origins of the group, so it's pretty good evidence to suggest that back in the lower part of the Cretaceous, the southern part of Pangaea was still a kind of single continental chunk."

Iguanas fall into the "New World" classification of lizards while chameleons and bearded dragons are of the Old World. G. sulamericana had Old World lizard qualities, but was found to have lived in the New World.

"As with many other scientific findings, this one raises a number of questions we haven't previously considered," study lead author Tiago Simoes, a PhD student under Caldwell, said in the release. "This finding raises a number of biogeographic and faunal turnover questions of great interest to both paleontologists and herpetologists that we hope to answer in the future."

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