After spending millions of years tucked away in rocks, fossils can sometimes resemble a completely different living thing. A turtle fossil might even bear a striking resemblance to a plant. When a team of paleontologists and paleobotanists re-examined a plant fossil first described about 20 years ago, they found out that it is actually the fossil of a baby turtle. The re-discovery is described in a study published December 7 in the journal Palaeontologia Electronica.
[Related: This 6-million-year-old turtle shell still has some DNA.]
Colombian priest Padre Gustavo Huertas collected rocks and fossils near the town of Villa de Levya from the 1950s to the 1970s. Two of the specimens Padre Huertas found were small, round rocks that had lines on them that looked like leaves, so he classified them as a type of fossil plant. They were described by Huertas in 2003 as Sphenophyllum colombianum and they date back to when dinosaurs roamed the Earth between 132 and 113 million years (Early Cretaceous period).
This fossil’s age and where it was found piqued the interest of Fabiany Herrera, the assistant curator of fossil plants at the Field Museum in Chicago and a paleobotanist at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia in Bogotá, Colombia and his postdoctoral student Héctor Palma-Castro.
“I am neither a turtle expert nor a paleo vertebrate [expert], but my student Héctor and I knew this specimen was not a fossil leaf,” Herrera tells PopSci. “Fossil leaves are usually preserved pretty flat and don’t have a bone-like texture, so we were quite intrigued as soon as we saw the fossil for the first time.”
At first glance, the fossils that are about two inches in diameter, looked like rounded nodules with the preserved leaves of the plant Sphenophyllum. They then noticed some key features weren’t quite right. They searched through the university’s fossil collections for other plants for comparison, and deciphering the shape and…
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