#SEATURTLE FOSSIL SKIN#
"An ancestral hard-shelled sea turtle with a mosaic of soft skin and scutes," Scientific Reports, Dec. The abundance of fossils in the location reflect "the organismal diversity immediately after the most pronounced greenhouse event of the Cenozoic, " the researchers state, in the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum. You canįour turtle fossils have been found at the location, but only two had preserved soft tissue. (Fur is the name of the island.) The island area's cliffs and quarries have ideal conditions for fossil preservation, and are the source of many fossilized insects, fish, reptiles and birds, as well as plants.īy signing up you agree to receive email newsletters or alerts Current Science Daily. The fossil was found in what's called the Fur Formation in Denmark, which is sediment composed of diatoms and clay mixed with volcanic ash. However, because the fossil is incomplete and one of its kind, the authors caution, their findings remain hypothetical and "need to be validated by additional soft-tissue specimens of similar age." The authors state their findings show the adaptation process from land to a marine environment "was more complex than hitherto appreciated, and included at least one evolutionary lineage with a mosaic of integumental features not seen in any living turtle." They are shed and replaced like snake skin when the turtle grows.
What makes this fossil different, the researchers report, is that "unlike its scaly living descendants," it combines scaleless limbs with a bony carapace covered in scutes." Scutes are hard plates that cover the turtle shell. The fossil turtle is a stem cheloniid, one of a family of large marine turtles that have paddle-like forelimb flippers. The fossil is unusual because it is a partial but well-preserved hard-shelled turtle with intact soft tissue remains.Ī team of scientists from Sweden, Denmark and North Carolina describes the fossil and its importance in the journal Nature's Scientific Reports, Dec. The finding in rock sediment in a northern Denmark island dates to the Eocene Period, about 54 million years ago. In evolutionary terms what happens when a terrestrial organism adapts to a marine environment? The recent discovery of a unique fossil turtle provides an unusual example of one such organism in transition from land to sea.
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