Nuevos restos de la tortuga Hylaeochelys del Jurásico portugués en el XIX Annual Meeting de la EAVP

Miembros del grupo de Biología Evolutiva de la UNED han presentado en Benevento (Italia), en el recientemente celebrado congreso de la European Association of Vertebrate Palaeontologists (EAVP), nuevo material de la hasta ahora escasamente representada tortuga Hylaeochelys en el registro portugués. El título de dicho trabajo ha sido el siguiente: “The holotype of Hylaeochelys kappa is no longer the only known specimen for this turtle genus in the Jurassic record”. Os dejamos aquí el resumen de la contribución, tal como se ha publicado en el libro de actas del congreso:

Turtle remains are very abundant in the Upper Jurassic (Oxfordian to Tithonian) record of the Lusitanian Basin (West-Central Portugal). The best represented lineage, especially considering its diversity, is that of the aquatic turtles Thalassochelydia. Thus, several members of the coastal marine clade Plesiochelyidae have been identified there, through relatively numerous finds since the 19th century. However, a member of Thalassochelydia not attributable to Plesiochelyidae was recently identified in the Lusitanian Basin. It corresponds to a representative of Hylaeochelys. Previously, the presence of this freshwater genus had been exclusively confirmed for the British Lower Cretaceous record. In fact, Hylaeochelys corresponds to the only representative of Thalassochelydia found in post-Jurassic levels. Hylaeochelys is known in the Portuguese record by a single specimen, corresponding to a partial articulated shell. It displays several character states that allowed its attribution to a different species: Hylaeochelys kappa. Therefore, knowledge about the Hylaeochelys taxon represented in the Jurassic levels is currently very limited. New data are provided here by the study of two new specimens of this genus from the Upper Jurassic levels of the Lusitanian Basin. Each of them comes from a different locality that are not the type locality of Hylaeochelys kappa. One of these individuals corresponds to a partial articulated shell, which preserves some regions not represented in the holotype of that species. The other is a disarticulated partial shell, which provides data on the variability of the genus in Portugal.

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Más información:

• Referencia: Pérez-García, A., Camilo, B., Ortega, F. 2022. The holotype of Hylaeochelys kappa is no longer the only known specimen for this turtle genus in the Jurassic record. Abstract book of the 19th Annual Meeting of the European Association of Vertebrate Palaeontologists: 157.