“It is quite rare to discover something that really tells you a little bit of the life of the past.”Ī member of the research team at the excavation site is seen in the Pyrenees. But most of them are uninformative,” Sellés said. “It is quite common to find bone fragments, a lot of them. Originally, researchers believed the bones belonged to a different kind of animal, according to Sellés. After quite a long study of the bone fragments, we realized that there were some features that were totally different, not present in any other fossil of a turtle species discovered so far,” said Albert Sellés, coauthor of the study and a postdoctoral researcher at the Autonomous University of Barcelona’s Miquel Crusafont Catalan Institute of Paleontology in Spain. “We never thought it was possible to find something like this. The bone fragments of this newly identified species, however, have led scientists to estimate that Leviathanochelys had a 3.7-meter-long body (12.1 feet), almost as big as an average sedan. Newly identified dinosaur that lived on island of dwarfed creatures had an unusual headīefore the discovery, the largest species uncovered in what’s now Europe measured at just 1.5 meters (5 feet) in length, similar to today’s leatherback sea turtles, which weigh an average of 300 to 500 kilograms (660 to 1,100 pounds) and measure 1 to 2 meters (or between 3 and 6.5 feet), according to the Smithsonian Institute. The unusual animal’s presence in this part of the prehistoric world revealed that giant turtles were more common than previously thought, according to the study.įelix Augustin/Peter Nickolaus/Dylan Bastiaans “Leviathan” is the biblical term for a sea monster, an allusion to the creature’s large body size, while “chelys” translates to turtle and “aenigmatica” translates to enigma - in reference to the turtle’s peculiar characteristics, wrote the authors of a paper published Thursday in the journal Scientific Reports. Initially found by a hiker who stumbled upon the remains in 2016 in the Pyrenees mountains of northern Spain, the species has been given the name Leviathanochelys aenigmatica. ![]() Now, scientists have discovered a previously unknown species - the largest sea turtle found in present-day Europe ever to be identified. ![]() ![]() Until recently, these prehistoric giants, reaching lengths of over 3 meters (10 feet) from head to tail, had been thought to be found only in waters surrounding North America. Long ago, gigantic marine turtles swam the Earth’s seas.
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