What do turtles use to communicate? A shell-phone.
Turtles have been used as characters in children’s stories, rhymes, puns and jokes but what do we really know about turtles, especially their defining shells?
It is commonly known that their shells are used for protection but newly discovered fossils suggest the earliest partially shelled turtles had a broad ribbed proto shell, which was initially an adaptation for burrowing underground.
Dr Tyler Lyson of the Denver Museum of Nature and Science said, “The earliest beginnings of the turtle shell was not for protection but rather for digging underground to escape the harsh South African environment where these early proto-turtles lived”.
The big breakthrough came with the discovery of several specimens of the oldest, around 260 million years old, partially shelled proto-turtles from the Karoo Basin of South Africa.
Several of these specimens were discovered but the most important specimen was found by a then eight-year-old South African boy on his father’s farm in the Western Cape.
