Healed bite marks on a Cretaceous ichthyosaur

Reports of pathological ichthyosaur fossils are very rare. The identification of a series of healed cuts and an associated gouge on the lower jaw of an adult (ca. 5 metres body length) Platypterygius specimen from the Lower Cretaceous of Australia is therefore significant, because it constitutes direct evidence of bite force trauma sustained during the life of the animal. Based on the close spacing and non−lethal facial positioning of the wounds, they were probably not inflicted by a predator. Alternative explanations might include an accidental aggressive encounter with another large vertebrate, or perhaps an intraspecific interaction such as during courtship or combat over food, mates, or territory

Nostimochelone lampra gen. et sp. nov., an enigmatic new podocnemidoidean turtle from the early miocene of Northern Greece

A new podocnemidoidean turtle, Nostimochelone lampra gen. et sp. nov., was recently recovered from littoral marine-estuarine sediments of the lower Miocene Zeugostasion Formation, near the village of Nostimo in northwestern Macedonia, Greece. This new taxon is characterized by a mosaic of primitive and derived features most notably the presence of a broad embayment on the anterior carapace margin, which involves both the nuchal (whose width > length) and first pair of peripherals, a continuous series of six markedly elongate and very narrowed hexagonal neural bones, extension of the axillary buttress onto the midline of the anteroposteriorly elongate costal I (leaving a concave scar) and also laterally across the peripheral II–peripheral III suture, medial contact of the humeral scutes (implying a small intergular), and extensive overlap of the pectoral scutes on the entoplastron, probably extending to the epiplastral–hyoplastral suture. Conclusive phylogenetic placement of Nostimochelone is difficult to establish because the remains are incompletely preserved. Nevertheless, its discovery is significant because it represents both the first record of a pleurodiran turtle from Greece and also one of only a handful of fossil podocnemidoidean occurrences thus far documented from the Neogene of Europe. © Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2013

Late Miocene tortoises from Samos, Greece: implications for European Neogene testudinid systematics and distributions

The world-famous upper Miocene fossil localities on the Aegean island of Samos in Greece have produced a rich fossil record that sheds light on the evolution of eastern Mediterranean terrestrial faunas over a one-million-year interval of the late Neogene. Fossils have been discovered on Samos since antiquity, although a succession of paleontological and commercial collecting expeditions over the last 130 years has resulted in specimens now being distributed throughout museums all over the world. Here, we survey the fossil tortoise remains from Samos, which are significant because they include early antecedents of the modern Testudo lineage, together with spectacular examples of the European Neogene gigantic testudinid †Titanochelon, which represents one of the largest-bodied terrestrial turtle taxa documented to date. All of the Samos fossils derive from the Mytilinii Formation, which spans the late MN11–early MN13 Neogene land mammal zones. The small-bodied tortoise remains include two incomplete shells that are morphologically consistent with basal testudonans and phylogenetically distinct from the coeval species Testudo marmorum found on mainland Greece. The Samos gigantic tortoise †‘Testudo’ schafferi was based on a spectacularly large skull and femur. However, we describe new plastron fragments, limb elements, and osteoderms that are compatible with †Titanochelon specimens from southern Greece and Anatolia. This could imply faunal links with the distinctive ‘Pikermian’ local assemblages from Asia Minor and concurs with the proposed late Miocene–Pliocene biogeographic segregation of large mammals from the eastern Aegean margin and Turkey relative to those occurring in northwestern Greece and the Balkan Peninsula. © 2020, © by the Society of Vertebrate Paleontology