05/15/2024
The Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History houses the skeleton of an Archelon ischyros, recognized as the largest turtle to have ever existed. This colossal sea creature bore gear-shaped bones, functioning as stomach bone plates that defended against threats from below. Interestingly, the skeleton displays a missing right lower flipper, with evidence suggesting this was due to an incident in its early life.
This injury potentially occurred during its hatchling phase, either from an attempted bird attack as it made its way to the sea or from a larger predator such as a mosasaur or a Xiphactinus. Estimated to have lived for about 100 years, this Archelon ischyros measured an impressive 15 feet (460 cm) from head to tail, spanned 13 feet (400 cm) from flipper to flipper, and weighed a remarkable 4,900 pounds (2,200 kg).
Living around 80 to 66 million years ago, these magnificent creatures" fossils were discovered in regions now part of South Dakota and Wyoming, once submerged under a shallow sea during the Late Cretaceous period. Their extinction might be linked to increased predation on their land-based eggs and hatchlings, along with a cooling climate, factors that other turtle species managed to endure due to their adaptive thermoregulation capabilities.