Nature
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A new species of giant freshwater turtle has been described by scientists who discovered the aquatic beast’s enormous jaw bone in the Brazilian Amazon. Its shell would’ve been around 1.8 meters (5.9 feet) long, making it larger than any turtle alive today.
The rest of this article is behind a paywall. Please sign in or subscribe to access the full content.Stephen King was the inspiration for the ancient turtle’s species name, Peltocephalus maturin.
“Maturin refers to the giant turtle that vomited out the universe in Stephen King's stories,” write the authors, “which in turn was inspired by the character Stephen Maturin who, in the book H.M.S. Surprise of Patrick O'Brian's Aubrey-Maturin series, names a giant tortoise.”
With a total shell size estimated to be 1.8 meters, it’s one of the largest freshwater turtles ever to exist. Not only this, it also marks the latest known occurrence of giant freshwater turtles, existing much later than most of the turtle behemoths that hail from the Miocene around 23 to 5 million years ago. This means that humans may have already reached South America while the Maturin turtles were still alive.
The exact age of the ancient turtle’s remains isn’t clear, with estimates ranging from 40,000 to 9,000 years old, landing it in the late Pleistocene. It's thought humans arrived there over 10,000 years ago, and studies have shown the ways in which our arrival shaped the rainforest.
"People settled in the Amazon region around 12,600 years ago,” said Dr Gabriel S. Ferreira from the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution in a statement. “We also know that large tortoises have been on the diet of hominins since the Paleolithic.”
“Whether freshwater turtles, which are much more difficult to catch due to their agility, were also eaten by early humans and whether Peltocephalus maturin—together with the South American megafauna—fell victim to human expansion is still unclear. Here we need more data from the Late Pleistocene and Early Holocene deposits of the Amazon Basin.”
If 40,000-year-old turtle meat doesn’t whet your appetite, how about some 50,000-year-old bison stew?
The study is published in Biology Letters.
