A paper published this week in the Royal Society’s Proc B* journal details a new species of primitive turtle, Eileanchelys waldmani, and helps narrow down when the shelly beasts took to the waves. From a block of rock from the Isle of Skye, off the Scottish coast, researchers extracted four well preserved turtle skeletons.

“Although the majority of modern turtles are aquatic forms, it has been convincingly demonstrated that the most primitive turtles from the Triassic, around 210 million years ago, were exclusively terrestrial,” says paper author Jérémy Anquetin, of the Natural History Museum, London and UCL (press release).

“Until the discovery of Eileanchelys, we thought that adaptation to aquatic habitat might have appeared among primitive turtles but we had no fossil evidence of that. Now, we know for sure that there were aquatic turtles around 164 million years ago.”

As if this wasn’t enough, the researchers have provided an awesome – if slightly over the top – illustration of what life might have been like on Skye all those years ago (full image below the fold).

Coverage

‘Missing link’ turtle was swimming with dinosaurs – Times

Ancient turtle discovered on Skye – BBC

*Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences, to give it it’s full title.

Image: Royal Society