My PhD focused on lacertid lizards, and in a lot of ways they are still my first love. The family Lacertidae contains over 300 species of small, mainly terrestrial lizards ranging from the Arctic Circle to the Cape of Africa. Although they may look unspectacular, lacertids are a fantastic system for evolutionary biology, since they are old, widespread, and inhabit dramatically diverse ecosystems throughout the Old World. Despite those features, they have failed to radiate into the multitude of forms as seen in equally widespread and ancient lizard groups like geckos or chameleons.

Molecular work over the past decades has consistently recovered lacertids as the sister-group to Amphisbaenia, a bizarre clade of limbless, head-first burrowing lizards.

Together with Johannes Müller and others, we provided the first morphological evidence for a lacertid-amphisbaenian relationship in the form of the Eocene lizard Cryptolacerta hassiaca, which we published in Nature in 2011.