HONG KONG: A fossil found in South America is of the oldest sea turtle ever found, researchers say, at least 25 million years older than the previous record-holder.
More than six feet long, the turtle, Desmatochelys padillai sp., lived around 120 million years ago, they say.
The “almost completely preserved skeleton” was found in 2007 in central Colombia and dated to the Cretaceous period based on its physical features and the age of the sediments in which the fossil was found, the researchers report in their published study of the creature appearing in the journal PaleoBios.
The age is significant, the researchers say; sea turtles descended from both terrestrial and freshwater turtles beginning about 230 million years ago, but during the Cretaceous period, they split into land- and sea-dwelling varieties.
With few fossil discoveries from the period, the exact timeline of the split has been difficult to pin down, the researchers say.
“This lends a special importance to every fossil discovery that can contribute to clarifying the phylogeny of the sea turtles,” says Edwin Cadena from the Senckenberg Research Institute in Frankfurt, Germany.
The new find represents the oldest confirmed record of sea turtles anywhere in the world, says Cardena and study co-author James Parham of California State University, Fullerton.
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