Las tortugas gigantes del Mioceno de Palencia en las XLI Jornadas de la SEP

Durante décadas se consideró que el material de tortugas gigantes de la meseta castellana había desaparecido durante la Guerra Civil Española y en el periodo de posguerra. Sin embargo, hace una década se demostró que esta afirmación era errónea. Muchos de los grandes caparazones habían sufrido notablemente y habían sido parcialmente fragmentados, pero permanecían ocultos en las colecciones del Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales de Madrid. La reconstrucción de muchos de ellos permitió, hace una década, la descripción de la especie tipo del nuevo género Titanochelon, del que se identifican actualmente cerca de una decena de representantes. Por desgracia, aunque algunos de los principales hallazgos de caparazones de esta gran tortuga realizados en las primeras décadas del siglo 20 procedían del cerro del Cristo del Otero, en Palencia, apenas se identificó material procedente de esta localidad. Recientemente se ha trabajado con más restos fragmentarios conservados en esta colección, de manera que se han podido identificar y reconstruir algunos caparazones parciales procedentes de Palencia. Estos hallazgos han sido presentados en las XLI Jornadas de la Sociedad Española de Paleontología. El resumen de esta investigación es el siguiente:

Titanochelon is the largest terrestrial turtle to have inhabited Europe, with a shell length exceeding 2 m. The genus includes around ten species, spanning from the Lower Miocene to the Lower Pleistocene (nearly 20 million years). Its type species is the Spanish Titanochelon bolivari. Material attributable to it is known since the 19th century and the species was described in the 1910s. However, the genus Titanochelon was not formally defined until 2014. Abundant material was found in the Spanish Castilian Plateau in the early 20th century under works supervised by Eduardo Hernández-Pacheco and José Royo y Gómez. A highly relevant discovery, made in 1921, consisted of about ten well-preserved, nearly complete and articulated shells from the MN7/8 zone (late Aragonian, Middle Miocene) of Cerro del Otero (Palencia Province). They were divided into blocks to facilitate transportation, subsequently reconstructing them in the laboratory of the Museo Nacional de Ciencias Naturales (MNCN). Unfortunately, the Spanish Civil War prevented a detailed study, and the classic material was considered destroyed due to the conflict. This idea has been recently refuted, recognizing that many complete classic shells were relatively well-preserved and displayed in the MNCN exhibition until the late 1980s. However, most were dramatically deteriorated since then, being drastically fractured and mixed in boxes containing hundreds of fragments from multiple individuals and localities. Others were completely destroyed. Despite reconstruction work in 2013, very few shell remains from Palencia were recovered, all very partially. However, as indicated in the publication describing Titanochelon, several additional unidentified small shell fragments from Palencia are also stored in the MNCN. A new effort to recover these shells is currently underway. This laborious work allows the partial reconstruction of some classic specimens, whose detailed anatomical study can be performed, for the first time, more than a century after their discovery.

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Más información:

• Referencia: Pérez-García, A., Martínez Fernández, I., Fraile Gracia, S. (2026) Recovering additional classic material of giant tortoises from the late Aragonian (Middle Miocene) of Cerro del Otero (Palencia, Spain). In Narváez, I., Martínez-Pérez, C., Rodríguez-Tovar, F. J., Ortega, F. (Eds.), Libro de Resúmenes de las XLI Jornadas SEP. Palaeontological publications, 10, 89.