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Reappraisal of Testudo antiqua (Testudines, Testudinidae) from the Miocene of Hohenhöwen, Germany

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  15 October 2015

Joseph A. Corsini ,
Madelaine Böhme  and
Walter G. Joyce
Joseph A. Corsini
Affiliation:
Department of Biology, Eastern Oregon University, La Grande, OR 97850, USA,
Madelaine Böhme
Affiliation:
Department of Geosciences, University of Tübingen, Hölderlinstr. 12, 72074 Tübingen, Germany Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoecology, Hölderlinstr. 12, 72074 Tübingen, Germany
Walter G. Joyce
Affiliation:
Department of Geosciences, University of Tübingen, Hölderlinstr. 12, 72074 Tübingen, Germany Yale Peabody Museum of Natural History, 170 Whitney Avenue, New Haven, CT 06511, USA
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Abstract

Testudo antiqua is one of the few fossil turtle names to have survived the past 200 years of taxonomic reshuffling with its original genus and specific epithet intact. The nine currently known specimens were collected from the middle Miocene Hohenhöwen locality in southern Germany. Because the available Hohenhöwen material was never fully described, we here completely document all known specimens. It is unclear which of these specimens formed the original T. antiqua type series, so we herein selected the best preserved representative as the neotype. A phylogenetic analysis places T. antiqua in a basal polytomy within the clade Testudo, indicating that T. antiqua may represent the ancestral morphology of Testudo. As with a number of other published studies, ours was unable to resolve relationships between the three extant Testudo lineages (the hermanni-group, the graeca/kleinmanni/marginata group, and the horsfieldii-group). Finally, with a view toward locating more turtles and in order to better understand the geological and ecological context of these tortoises, we visited Hohenhöwen several times to search for the original collection sites, but we were unable to locate the original fossil quarries described in the literature.

Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Paleontology , Volume 88 , Issue 5 , September 2014 , pp. 948 - 966
Copyright
Copyright © The Paleontological Society 

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