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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