Tuataras often live to be one hundred years old.

Natalie Angier of the New York Times has an interesting article today about the tuatara, one of Earth’s most unusual vertebrates. Found in New Zealand, the tuatara are lizard-looking reptiles with a third eye atop their skulls and are referred to as “living fossils.” An excerpt:

“The tuatara — whose name comes from the Maori language and means ‘peaks on the back’ — is not an iguana, is not a lizard, is not like any other reptile alive today.

In fact, as a series of recent studies suggest, it is not like any other vertebrate alive today. The tuatara, scientists have learned, is in some ways a so-called living fossil, its basic skeletal layout and skull shape almost identical to that of tuatara fossils dating back hundreds of millions of years, to before the rise of the dinosaurs. Certain tuatara organs and traits also display the hallmarks of being, if not quite primitive, at least closer to evolutionary baseline than comparable structures in other animals.

For example, the tuatara has a third eye at the top of its skull, the legendary if poorly understood pineal eye, which is found in only a sprinkling of reptile species and which vision researchers suspect harks back to nature’s original eye — pretty much a few light-sensitive cells on a stalk. A tuatara’s teeth likewise follow the no-nonsense design seen in dinosaur dentition, erupting directly from the jawbone and without the niceties of tooth sockets and periodontal ligaments that characterize the teeth of all mammals and many reptiles. Some researchers are looking at tuataras for clues to how dental implants, which are inserted directly into the jaw, might be improved.”