Unique among Earth's creatures, turtles are the only animals to form a shell on the outside of their bodies through a fusion of modified ribs, vertebrae and shoulder girdle bones.
The turtle shell is a unique modification, and how and when it originated has fascinated and confounded biologists for more than two centuries.
A Smithsonian Institution scientist and colleagues recently discovered that the beginnings of the turtle shell started 40 million years earlier than previously thought.
The oldest known fossil turtle dated back about 210 million years, but it had an already fully formed shell, giving no clues to early shell evolution.
Also Read
It had a fully developed plastron (the belly portion of a turtle's shell), but only a partial carapace made up of distinctively broadened ribs and vertebrae on its back.
With this knowledge the scientists turned to newly discovered specimens of Eunotosaurus africanus, a South African species 40 million years older than O semitestacea that also had distinctively broadened ribs.
Their detailed study of Eunotosaurus indicated it uniquely shared many features only found in turtles, such as no intercostal muscles that run in between the ribs, paired belly ribs and a specialised mode of rib development, which indicates that Eunotosaurus represents one of the first species to form the evolutionary branch of turtles.
"There are several anatomical and developmental features that indicate Eunotosaurus is an early representative of the turtle lineage; however, its morphology is intermediate between the specialised shell found in modern turtles and primitive features found in other vertebrates. As such, Eunotosaurus helps bridge the morphological gap between turtles and other reptiles," said Lyson.
Ribs in most other animals protect internal organs and help ventilate the lungs to assist breathing. Because the ribs of turtles have been modified to form the shell, they have also had to modify the way they breathe with specialised muscles.