Lizard looker: Artist's reconstruction of how Odontochelys semitestacea, an ancestral turtle from the Triassic of China, might have looked in life.
Credit: Marlene Donnelly
Aquatic origin
The team of scientists, led by Lau Li-Jun of the Zhejiang Museum of Natural History in Hangzhou, China also suggest that the new find points to an aquatic origin for turtles.
The fact that O. semitestacea has only a half-shell on top but a fully-formed plastron – like turtles today – is evidence that its underside was exposed to predators in the water.
"Reptiles living on the land have their bellies close to the ground with little exposure to danger," said co-author Olivier Rieppel of The Field Museum in Chicago.
The scientists also found other marine reptiles and invertebrates embedded in the same rocks in Guizhou Province, China, that yielded the new turtle species.
