Car Tire Turtle (Puentemys mushaisaensis)

Illustration: Liz Bradford
July 12, 2012
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Illustration: Liz Bradford

Artist's rendering of a live Puentemys mushaisaensis, a new species of fossil turtle that lived 60 million years ago in what is now northwestern South America, discovered and described in by paleontologist Carlos Jaramillo’s group at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. The most peculiar feature of this new turtle is its extremely circular shell, about the size and shape of a big car tire.