Ancient toothed turtles survived until 160m years ago
Today's turtles don't have teeth; they cut off their food using hard ridges on their jaws. But their ancestors were not so dentally challenged. A team of international researchers including Dr. Márton Rabi from the Biogeology Lab of the University of Tübingen has now discovered that turtles with remnants of teeth survived 30 million years later than previously thought. The researchers found evidence of this at a major excavation site in China's western Autonomous Region of Xinjiang. Up to now, the most recent finds of toothed turtles were 190 million years old. The new discovery also helps to fill in some of the puzzle pieces in the chelonian family tree and in the distribution of the family over many millions of years. The researchers have published their findings in the latest edition of BMC Evolutionary Biology.