Fossils of a 57-million-year-old giant turtle have been unearthed by paleontologists in Colombia. According to the team from the University of Rosário, the bones belong to the Puentemys mushaisaensi, and were located in the mountainous municipality of Socha, in the northeast of the country.
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Remains of the animals had never been found in the region
- According to researchers, these ancient turtles lived 57 million years ago and were about 1.5 meters long.
- Animals inhabited our planet in the geological interval in which the strong evolutionary explosion of mammals occurred.
- It was during this period that they began to occupy the places left by the dinosaurs.
- The discovery is unprecedented in the region, as specimens of this species were only found hundreds of kilometers away, in a coal mine near the Caribbean Sea, also in Colombia.
- The study was published in the scientific journal Asociación Paleontológica Argentina.
- The information is from UOL.
Fossils reveal the continent’s past
According to the team responsible for the study, the discovery allows us to project what South America was like millions of years ago. Researchers believe that the landscape has changed a lot since then.
Find them [os fósseis] 500 kilometers south […] allows us to reconstruct and understand what the landscapes of northern South America were like. Instead of the current Andean mountains with more than 5,000 meters in altitude, there were connected lakes and very low altitude mountain ranges.
Edwin Cadena, paleontologist who led the research
The work also allows us to better understand the connectivity of aquatic environments in northern South America during a part of geological time known as Paleocene-Eocene. These eras are part of the Paleogene (66 to 23 million years ago), the first geological period after the extinction of the dinosaurs.
In other words, the discovery of giant tortoise fossils makes it possible to better understand the changes that took place on Earth after the disappearance of the dinosaurs.
