Giant turtles all the way down

IT was large, that much was obvious. When Edwin Cadena first saw the fossil in 2005, he thought he might be uncovering another specimen of Titanoboa cerrejonensis, the ancient snake he and his colleagues discovered in 2004 on a Smithsonian expedition lead by Carlos Jaramillo, Jason Head, and Jonathan Bloch. But as he slowly picked the rock away, the fossil was revealed as another giant reptile, a ~58-million-year-old contemporary of Titanoboa, and one of the largest freshwater turtles ever found. So big, even the 13-meter, two ton snake probably couldn’t swallow it. He named it Carbonemys cofrinii, “coal turtle.” Leer más.