Posted on 08/24/2018 12:24:21 PM PDT by ETL
Named Eorhynchochelys sinensis, the newly-discovered turtle lived approximately 228 million years ago (Triassic period) in what is now southwestern China.
“This creature was over 6 feet long, it had a strange disc-like body and a long tail, and the anterior part of its jaws developed into this strange beak. It probably lived in shallow water and dug in the mud for food,” said Dr. Olivier Rieppel, a paleontologist at Field Museum.
“Eorhynchochelys sinensis isn’t the only kind of early turtle that paleontologists have discovered — there is another early turtle with a partial shell but no beak. Until now, it’s been unclear how they all fit into the reptile family tree.”
“The origin of turtles has been an unsolved problem in paleontology for many decades. Now with Eorhynchochelys sinensis, how turtles evolved has become a lot clearer.”
The fact that Eorhynchochelys sinensis developed a beak before other early turtles but didn’t have a shell is evidence of mosaic evolution — the idea that traits can evolve independently from each other and at a different rate, and that not every ancestral species has the same combination of these traits.
Modern turtles have both shells and beaks, but the path evolution took to get there wasn’t a straight line. Instead, some turtle relatives got partial shells while others got beaks, and eventually, the genetic mutations that create these traits occurred in the same animal.
“This impressively large fossil is a very exciting discovery giving us another piece in the puzzle of turtle evolution. It shows that early turtle evolution was not a straightforward, step-by-step accumulation of unique traits but was a much more complex series of events that we are only just beginning to unravel,” said Dr. Nick Fraser, from the National Museums Scotland.
Fine details in Eorhynchochelys sinensis’ skull solved another turtle evolution mystery.
(Excerpt) Read more at sci-news.com ...
Photograph of the fossil turtle Eorhynchochelys sinensis. Image credit: Nick Fraser, National Museums Scotland.
Fossils are fascinating and beautiful.
I was only THIS TALL then...............
Thank you.
"Help, I've fallen and can't get up!"
Thanks ETL.
*ping*
Another crucial discovery made by the scientific community on somebody else’s dollar.
I wonder where research would go if scientists were required to finance their own studies. I have no problem with the results if they are interesting, but no one really gives a rat’s ass about a 200 million year old turtle that apparently was a bottom feeder like most turtles today.
Where I hunt in NY Southern Tier is a shale field filled mostly with Devonian fossils. Mostly little clam like shells. Occasionally you find the imprint of what looks like a sea worm. I keep the good ones I find.
Oooohh...... thanks for that graphic.
I've lived in New York City all of my 60 years. As a onetime geology major in the 1980s and avid camper, I've been Upstate many times (Catskills and Finger Lakes mainly). Lived in Central NY for ~two years in '89, in an old farmhouse in Beaver Meadow.
Yes, the Catskills are basically a large set of sedimentary beds atop layers of fossiliferous limestone. Where rivers and/or roadcuts dig deep enough the limestone sequences are exposed. This occurs mostly along the perimeter of the Catskills.
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