Sunday 26 August 2018

The mystery behind Eorhynchochelys sinensis - the Tortoise without a Shell


Image courtesy of Adrienne Stroup, Field Museum.




Joel Kontinen

This strange creature is named Eorhynchochelys sinensis. It is said to be “228 million years old.”

"’ This creature was over six 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,’ says Olivier Rieppel, a paleontologist at Chicago's Field Museum and one of the authors of a new paper in Nature.

Science Daily, for instance, brings up the topic of now turtles could live without a shell.

“The fact that Eorhynchochelys 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.

We also have mosaic-like creatures at our time, for instance, the platypus – and its not turning into a new species. It isn’t a case of evolution.

Source:

Field Museum. 2018. Fossil turtle didn't have a shell yet, but had the first toothless turtle beak: 228-million-year-old fossil sheds light on how turtles evolved . Science Daily. (22 August).
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