![]() ![]() Turtles in this group dwell in tropical and subtropical oceans among their representatives are the modern Hawksbill Turtle and the Green Sea Turtle of turtle soup fame. Since then, they have been stored in the collections of the "Centro de Investigaciones Paleontológicas" in Villa Leyva and the "University of California Museum of Paleontology."Ĭadena and his colleague examined the almost complete skeleton, four additional skulls and two partially preserved shells, and they placed the fossils in the turtle group Chelonioidea, based on various morphological characteristics. The fossilized remains of the ancient reptiles were discovered and collected by hobby paleontologist Mary Luz Parra and her brothers Juan and Freddy Parra in the year 2007. The fossilized turtle shells and bones come from two sites near the community of Villa de Leyva in Colombia. "This lends a special importance to every fossil discovery that can contribute to clarifying the phylogeny of the sea turtles," explains the turtle expert from Columbia. Fossil evidence from this time period is very sparse, however, and the exact time of the split is difficult to verify. The original fossil specimen of this largest of the Worlds turtles was collected from the Pierre Shale of South Dakota in the mid 1970s. During the Cretaceous period, they split into land and sea dwellers. Sea turtles descended from terrestrial and freshwater turtles that arose approximately 230 million years ago. The abundant turtle fossil record supports the conclusion that turtles have remained ‘unchanged for at least 150 million years.’ 14 Flank concludes that ‘Turtle fossils are found more often than other animals of similar size, and the evolutionary history of the modern turtle is fairly well known’ except the earliest turtle ancestors and. originates from Cretaceous sediments and is at least 120 million years old," says Cadena. Summary: Sharktooth Hill near Bakersfield, Calif., is the home of the most extensive marine bone bed in the world, a 100-square-mile layer of shark, seal, ray, whale, turtle and fish bones. "The turtle described by us as Desmatochelys padillai sp. Parham of California State University, Fullerton. Cadena made the unusual discovery together with his colleague from the US, J. Edwin Cadena, a scholar of the Alexander von Humboldt foundation at the Senckenberg Research Institute. "We described a fossil sea turtle from Colombia that is about 25 million years older," rejoices Dr. " Santanachelys gaffneyi is the oldest known sea turtle" – this sentence from the online encyclopedia Wikipedia is no longer up to date. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |