Ancient Turtle Was as Big as Small Car
Content via livescience.com. Artwork by Liz Bradford.

A turtle the size of a small car once roamed what is now South America 60 million years ago, suggests its fossilized remains.

Discovered in a coal mine in Colombia in 2005, the turtle was given the name Carbonemys cofrinii, which means “coal turtle.” It wasn’t until now that the turtle was examined and described in a scientific journal; the findings are detailed online today (May 17) in the Journal of Systematic Paleontology.

The researchers say C. cofriniibelongs to a group of side-necked turtles known as pelomedusoides. The turtle’s skull, roughly the size of an NFL football, was the most complete of the fossil remains.

In addition to its colossal size, the turtle would have been equipped with massive, powerful jaws, meaning it could’ve eaten just about anything in its range, from mollusks (a group that includes snails) to smaller turtles and even crocodiles, the researchers noted.

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Photo by Ken Zirkel on Flickr.

Theropod ichnites (aka fossilised footprints) at Dinosaur State Park, Connecticut, USA. These prints are known as Eubrontes (=Grallator) which date from the Early Jurassic.

Eubrontes is not the name of a specific dinosaur, but is the name of the footprints themselves (a type of ichnotaxon or ichnogenus) which basically categorises the shapes of these trackways and the dates of when these prints were made. We do not know exactly what dinosaur species created these footprints.

Ankylosaur Reef
Article content from smithsonianmag.com (by Brian Switek).
A full-size restoration of what Aletopelta might have looked like, at the San Diego Natural History Museum. Photo by Brian Switek.

“Dinosaurs created temporary reefs. At least, the ones whose bodies floated out to sea did.”

“Even though there were no aquatic dinosaurs, dead dinosaurs sometimes washed down rivers to the coast. When their bodies settled on the ocean bottom, scavengers of various sorts and sizes glommed onto the dinosaurs and formed short-lived communities with their own ecological tempo—perhaps similar to what happens to the carcasses of modern whales. The Cretaceous dinosaur bones found in my home state of New Jersey are the result of this kind of transport and marine breakdown, and other examples have been found at sites around the world.”

“Even bodies of the heavily armored ankylosaurs were sometimes swept out to sea. They must have been quite a sight—a bloated, belly-up ankylosaur, drifting for as long as the gases inside its body could keep it afloat. One of these dinosaurs, found miles from the closest land at that time, was recently discovered in the oilsands of Alberta, Canada, but this wandering ankylosaur isn’t the only one we know of. When I visited the San Diego Natural History Museum last month, I saw another.”

“Hung on the wall, the creature was less than half the dinosaur it used to be. Even though additional parts of the dinosaur were recovered when it was excavated during the construction of the Palomar-McClellan Airport in 1987, the articulated hindlimbs and adjoining hip material is what museum visitors are greeted with. (The rest sits in the collections.) At first glance, the specimen doesn’t look like much. But what makes this fossil so strange is the group of associated creatures. Embedded on and around the dinosaur bones were shells from marine bivalves and at least one shark’s tooth. This ankylosaur had settled and been buried in the sea off the coast of Cretaceous California.”

“Tracy Ford and James Kirkland described the ankylosaur in a 2001 paper included in The Armored Dinosaurs. Previously, the specimen didn’t have a proper scientific name. The dinosaur was simply referred to as the Carlsbad ankylosaur. And the details of the dinosaur’s armor, especially over the hips, seemed to be quite similar to that of another dinosaur called Stegopelta. This would make the Carlsbad ankylosaur anodosaurid, a group of ankylosaurs that typically have large shoulder spikes but lack a tail club.”

“After reexamining the specimen, though, Ford and Kirkland came to a different conclusion. The dinosaur’s armor identified it as an ankylosaurid, the armored dinosaur subgroup that carried hefty, bony tail clubs. The club itself was not discovered, but the rest of the dinosaur’s anatomy fit the ankylosaurid profile. And the dinosaur was different enough from others to warrant a new name. Ford and Kirkland called the ankylosaur Aletopelta coombsi. The genus name, meaning “wandering shield,” is a tribute to the fact that the movements of geologic plates had carried the dinosaur’s skeleton northward over the past 75 million years.”

“We may never know exactly what happened to this Aletopelta. Detailed geological context is essential for figuring out how a skeleton came to rest in a particular spot, and that information was destroyed with the excavation of the skeleton. Still, paleontologists have put together a general outline of what happened to this dinosaur. The unfortunate ankylosaurid died somewhere along the coast, and its carcass was washed out to the sea by a river, local flood, or similar watery mode of transport. Aletopelta settled belly-up and was exposed for long enough to become a food source and even home for various organisms. Sharks and other larger scavengers tore at the carcass, but various encrusting invertebrates also settled on the skeleton. Fortunately for paleontologists, the skeleton was sturdy enough to survive all this and eventually be buried. Even though dinosaurs never lived in the marine realm, their deaths certainly enriched the sea.”

References: Ford, T., Kirkland, J. 2001. Carlsbad ankylosaur (Ornithischia: Ankylosauria): An ankylosaurid and not a nodosaurid. pp. 239-260 in Carpenter, K., ed. The Armored Dinosaurs. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Hilton, R.P. 2003. Dinosaurs and Other Mesozoic Reptiles of California. Berkeley: University of California Press. pp.39-40

What a Croc!
Photo: Specimen KNM-ER 1683 of Crocodylus thorbjarnarsoni. A-C is the skull seen from the top, bottom, and left side. D and E show the lower jaw from the top and the right side. Modified from Brochu and Storrs, 2012.
Article Content via Wired. 

“Paleontologists Christopher Brochu and Glenn Storrs have just named a new croc that hid in the rivers and lakes of prehistoric Kenya between 2 and 4 million years ago.”

“Brochu and Storrs named the predator Crocodylus thorbjarnarsoni. The animal was an older cousin of Africa’s modern Nile crocodile (Crocodylus niloticus). But the fossil crocodile was larger. While the biggest Nile crocodile ever recorded was a little short of 21 feet, Crocodylus thorbjarnarsoni may have been over 27 feet long. If the estimates of Brochu and Storrs are correct, the newly-named fossil form was the largest species of Crocodylus ever.”

“Granted, that’s not as gargantuan as Deinosuchus, but a 27-foot crocodile would have surely been scary enough for the prehistoric humans of the Turkana Basin. As Brochu and Storrs lay out in the abstract of the paper describing the crocodile, “[Crocodylus thorbjarnarsoni] would have been the largest predator in its environment, and the early humans found in the same deposits were presumably part of its prey base.”

Read more on Wired.