A new species of a snapping turtle (Pan-Chelydridae/Chelydropsis) from the Upper Miocene (MN9, early Vallesian) of Southwest Germany

ABSTRACT

Chelydropsis is a genus of the clade Pan-Chelydridae, which existed and was distributed in Eurasia from the Eocene to the end of the Pliocene. The Chelydropsis fossil record of North of the Alps is particularly rich throughout the Miocene. In this study, we describe a new Chelydropsis species from the Late Miocene (Vallesian, MN9) fossiliferous site of Höwenegg in southwestern Germany. The new species is based on a nearly complete Chelydropsis skeleton, which stands out among the best preserved and most complete specimens ever found until now. The new species, Chelydropsis heweneggensis sp. nov. is of particular importance. It differs from the coeval Chelydropsis murchisoni, which recent studies suggest is the only Chelydropsis species known to have existed in Europe from the Middle Miocene to the Pliocene. The species described herein thus adds to the diversity of the European Neogene Chelydropsis record.

KEYWORDS:

• Pan-Chelydridae
• Chelydropsis
• freshwater turtles
• Late Miocene
• Germany

Acknowledgments

We would like to deeply thank Wolfgang Munk who was responsible for the collection containing the specimen. We deeply thank the staff members of the Palaeontology and Evolution section of the SMNK and especially Christiane Birnbaum for the initial preparation of the skeleton, Dennis Grabow and the library of SMNK for granting access to scientific literature about Chelydropsis murchisoni from Öhningen and Tim Niggemeyer for excavation’s information. We deeply thank Mathias Vielsäcker for his contributions in capturing some of the skeleton images that were utilized in this study. We deeply thank Walter Joyce, Serjoscha Evers and Juliana Sterli for their generous contributions of comparative material, which greatly aided our study. We deeply thank Madelaine Boehme, Ingmar Wernebung, Gabriel S. Ferreira for granting us access to comparative material from (Burke, 1985) the Palaeontological Collection of Tübingen University as well as the staff members of Palaeontological lab and especially Christina Kyriakouli. We deeply thank Vasilis Golfinopoulos for providing his valuable insights in the configuration of the images. We express our sincere gratitude to Gareth Dyke, the Chief editor of Historical Biology for editorial handling. We extend our heartfelt thanks to Yann Rollot, to an anonymous reviewer, to Walter Joyce and Igor Gennadievich Danilov for providing valuable feedback in order to improve our manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08912963.2024.2339898.

Additional information

Funding

IP’s research was supported by the DAAD Short-Term Grant, 2021 (57552336) and the «The implementation of the doctoral thesis was co-financed by Greece and the European Union (European Social Fund-ESF) through the Operational Programme «Human Resources Development, Education and Lifelong Learning» in the context of the Act “Enhancing Human Resources Research Potential by undertaking a Doctoral Research” Sub-action 2: IKY Scholarship Programme for PhD candidates in the Greek Universities».