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.
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, Citation1985) 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.