A flattened but mainly complete late Jurassic period turtle fossil was recently discovered in modern-day Germany. The flat-as-a-pancake Solnhofia parsonsi specimen is now assisting palaeontologists in learning more about how these reptiles originated and survived in shallower maritime habitats.The findings were revealed in a paper published in the journal PLOS ONE on July 26.
“The very good preservation of the fossils in the layers of limestone can be explained by the environmental conditions at the time,” co-author and paleoecologist Andreas Matzke of the University of Tübingen stated in a statement.
S. parsonsi lived in a Bavaria that looked and felt nothing like it does today. Around 150 million years ago, the area in southern Germany near Munich was a shallow tropical archipelago surrounded by spongey reefs. Scavengers had a difficult, if not impossible, time picking apart the carcasses of creatures like S. parsonsi that perished in these saline and low oxygen bodies of water, resulting in beautifully preserved specimens like this turtle pancake.
The turtle’s head and carapace are comparatively short, as indicated by this specimen, implying that it lived near the coast. This is in contrast to modern sea turtles, which have extended flippers and live in the open sea.
“No Solnhofia individual with such completely preserved extremities has ever been described before,” stated study co-author and University of Tübingen palaeontologist Felix Augustin in a release.
The fossil also includes the turtle’s head and carapace (upper back). S. parsonsi possessed a long and pointed beak, as well as a triangular heat about 3.5 inches long.
