While the discovery of another reptile converging on gliding morphology is "delicious," as indicated by Dr. Shipman, Mecistotrachelos and the anatomically similar, and also extinct, Icarosaurus are not a "new kind of animal. Furthermore, there is even a growing body of work, especially by University of California, Berkeley, professor Jim McGuire, on the diversity and biomechanics of the living genus Draco.
New technologies may give us insight into the anatomy of extinct animals, but, in many cases, it is living animals that provide us with the ability to interpret the behavior and functional anatomy of the extinct forms.
Several readers, including Drs. Blackburn and Reiskind, wished I had included information on Draco, the beautiful rib-gliding lizard that lives in Southeast Asia. I greatly envy Dr. Reiskind the experience of seeing Draco in the wild. I decided not to discuss Draco in my article because I didn't want to foster the incorrect assumption that Mecistotrachelos is an ancestor of Draco. The taxonomic distinctions among the various rib-gliders are complicated.
Mecistotrachelos is an archosauromorph, which makes it closer to crocodiles and dinosaurs than lizards. In contrast, Icarosaurus is a basal form that might be a lepidosauromorph a very primitive lizard-like form or might be an archosauromorph, depending on which taxonomist you talk to. Soon after the paper describing Mecistotrachelos came out, a group headed by Pi-Peng Li of Shenyang Normal University published a description of another new gliding lizard from the early Cretaceous of China, which represents yet another independent evolution of rib-gliding.
The new lizard is related to two other fruit-eating monitors in the Philippines, all of which have seen their numbers drop significantly due habitat destruction, as well as hunting and trapping for the pet trade.
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