Giant Ancient Sea Turtle Bones Found and Re-United After 162 Years

Researchers reunited two halves of a fossil bone belonging to an ancient sea turtle that were unearthed over 160 years apart. This now-complete bone offers an image of the largest ancient sea turtles that roamed Earth.

Researchers have reunited the fossil of a giant turtle called Atlantocheys mortonis with the other missing half that was unearthed 162 years later.  On assembling the bones together the team at Drexel University calculated the overall size of the animal. Its huge size makes it one of the largest sea turtles ever known. According to the researchers, this ancient sea turtle may have resembled the modern loggerhead turtles.

An amateur paleontologist Gregory Harpel was on a hunt for fossil shark teeth in New Jersey when he accidently stumbled upon a mysterious heavy rocky object. Curious to know more about the mysterious fossilized object, Harpel look the heavy fossil to experts at the New Jersey State Museum and finally donated it to the museum.

At the museum, Jason Schein-assistant curator of natural history and another curator David Parris were quick to recognize the object as a bone belonging to a turtle. They said the fossil was indeed a humerus, the large upper arm bone.

On carefully examining the bone, Parris saw that the fossil looked similar to a massive partial turtle limb that was housed at the Academy of the Natural Sciences of Drexel University, found in 1the 840s in New Jersey.

Similar to the New Jersey fossil, this fossil also had a broken shaft but on the proximal end near the shoulder whereas the recently unearthed bone had a broken shaft on the distal end near to the elbow.

"As soon as those two halves came together, like puzzle pieces, you knew it," Dr. Ted Daeschler from the Academy of Natural Sciences of Drexel University, said in a statement.

This specimen was originally named by 19^th century naturalist Louis Agassiz as the first specimen of its genus and species.

"Sure enough, you have two halves of the same bone, the same individual of this giant sea turtle," said Daeschler. "One half was collected at least 162 years before the other half."

The team was surprised at how the fossil survived such a long exposure and remained intact in New Jersey's streambed. Based on the completely assembled A. mortoni, scientists claim that the animal measured 10 feet from tip to tail and was much larger than the present day sea turtles.

They predict that the entire unbroken limb was trapped in the sediments during the Cretaceous Period 70-75 million years ago, time when the huge specimens existed. Gradually the erosion of sediments took place and the bone broke apart some millions of years back during the Pleistocene or Holocene era.

The finding was documented in the Proceedings of the Academy of Natural Sciences of Philadelphia.