Researchers discover nearly complete fossils of ancient turtle with ‘pig’ snout

A team of researchers from the Natural History Museum of Utah recently announced the discovery of fossils of a unusual ancient turtle that lived millions of years ago alongside dinosaurs. And it doesn’t stop there – the team also found a almost complete forelimb, partial hind-limbs and vertebrae from the neck and tail.

Currently, the fossil is being analyzed by a team of researchers led by doctoral student Josh Lively, at the University of Texas in Austin.

It is the only species of turtle that has been found with two bony nasal openings. While they do have separate nostrils, those are actually soft-tissued.

Joshua Lively studied the 2 feet long fossil for his master’s thesis at the University of Utah.

Aside from its highly unusual nose, the Arvinachelys actually raises even more questions regarding its former habitat.

The fossil belonging to the extinct group called Baenidae was identified in an area where other ancient remnants were unearthed, such as those pertaining to the armored Ankylosaurus, the crested hadrosaur Parasaurolophus, the tyrannosaur Teratophoneus, the duck-billed Gryposaurus monumentensis and the horned Nasutoceratops. Researchers say that when the turtle walked on Earth, the conditions of Southern Utah were similar to the ones that characterize Louisiana today: a wet and hot climate, with an environment dominated by rivers, bayous, and floodplains.

The pig-snouted turtle, as the name suggests, has two bony nasal openings. And goldeni honors Jerry Golden, a volunteer fossil preparator at the Natural History Museum of Utah, who prepared the new holotype specimen – and many others in the museum’s collections. In 2014, volunteers provided 14,500 hours of work. It’s a massive contribution. We couldn’t do what we do without them. We couldn’t do what we do without them.

It’s important because it fills a gap in understanding the evolution of turtles. It’s already known that the dinosaurs of southern Laramidia diversified while isolated from their relatives in the northern parts of the continent, and did not seem to interbreed with the populations from the north.

An artist’s depiction of the turtle Arvinachelys goldeni as it would have appeared in life 76 milion years ago in southern Utah.

A combination of rising sea levels and persistent changes in the climate might have created barriers to dispersal during the Cretaceous Period, researchers said. This will help scientists fit the new species into the evolutionary history of turtles and will also provide them with a good model in order to compare past and present species.