In chameleons, differences in growth rate can occur, even between individuals from the same clutch of eggs. This is largely driven by differences in temperature, which can affect speed of development with lower temperature resulting in longer time to hatching18,19. In addition, the duration of embryonic diapause can differ between clusters of eggs, so that time of oviposition does not necessarily correlate with actual developmental stage20. Weight of embryos has been demonstrated to exhibit good correlation to developmental phase for staging of odontogenesis in mouse embryos21. We therefore used both number of embryonic days and embryonic weight to characterize our samples. Before scanning, all samples were embedded in 1% agarose gel in 1.5 ml Eppendorf tube in order to prevent the movement during the micro-CT scan. Samples were first scanned without staining in order to analyze the hard dental tissue and underlying jaw bone. For the evaluation of the soft tissue morphology and their relationship to hard tissues, five of the previously scanned samples were counterstained and underwent further analysis after re-scanning.