Artículo de revista
Freshwater turtles (Testudines: Pleurodira) in the Upper Cretaceous of Chilean Patagonia
Fecha
2020Registro en:
Journal of South American Earth Sciences 102 (2020) 102652
10.1016/j.jsames.2020.102652
Autor
Alarcón Muñoz, Jhonatan
Soto Acuña, Sergio
Manríquez, Leslie
Fernández, Roy A.
Bajor, Dániel
Guevara Henríquez, Juan Pablo
Suazo Lara, Felipe
Leppe, Marcelo A.
Vargas Milne, Alexander
Institución
Resumen
We describe remains of freshwater turtles from the Upper Cretaceous of Chilean Patagonia. The fossils, which comprise isolated shell fragments and incomplete
appendicular bones, were recovered from meandering fluvial deposits of the Dorotea Formation (upper Campanian–Danian), in the Río de Las Chinas Valley,
Magallanes region. These remains represent the first records of Upper Cretaceous pan-chelid pleurodiran turtles in the Magallanes-Austral Basin. The shell fragments
show a strong ornamentation of irregular polygons distributed over their entire external surface, and one of the peripheral plates is narrow and elongated. These
features are consistent with traits described in Yaminuechelys, a chelid genus from the Upper Cretaceous and Paleogene of Argentinian Patagonia. In addition, the
suprapygal plate presents sulci that mark the limits of the vertebral scute 5 and the marginal scutes 12 as in Yaminuechelys sulcipeculiaris. This finding represents the
southernmost record of a species conferred to Yaminuechelys, extending the distribution of this genus to the Magallanes-Austral basin during the
Campanian–Maastrichtian.