Detecting collective dead turtle fossils

'Bone overlaps with bones, we couldn't believe our eyes,' said Oliver Wings, a paleontologist and honorary researcher at the Naturkunde museum in Berlin. He is describing spectacular fossils of 1800 Jurassic turtles in China's northwest Xinjiang province. Wings and fossil turtle expert from the University of Tübingen, Dr. Walter Joyce, worked with Chinese paleontologists in the area in 2008.

The results of their research in 2009 and 2011 were published in the German journal Naturwissenschaften.

"This position is probably double the number of turtles that have been known since the Jurassic period ," Walter Joyce said. 'Some tortoise shells are piled up on another shell in the stone' . This is what paleontologists call a bone bed - in this case only turtle shells.

Collectivedead turtle fossils

Wings, Joyce and their research team made several expeditions to the arid region since 2007. They searched for fossil sharks, crocodiles, mammals and some horrible bone fragments. long.

Today Xinjiang is one of the driest areas in the world. 160 million years ago Xinjiang was a verdant land with rivers and lakes, full of life. However, scientists have said later that conditions are not always ideal, along with climate change leading to seasonal dryness and finding these remarkable fossils.

The turtles gathered in one of the remaining water holes during a very dry period waiting for rain to come. Today's turtles, like turtles in Australia, for example, do the same. But with the Xinjiang turtles, rain came too late. Many turtles have died before and their bodies decay. When the water came, it came with a vengeance: a river of mud, swept away turtles and sediments with it and packed them into one place, like ancient paleontologists found the location. there and its rock layers.

Large number of turtles, allowing researchers to perform the first statistical analysis of Jurassic Asian turtles. The simultaneous death of these turtles and preservation creates the ability to compare variation, development and differences in characteristics between species.

Scientists are looking for sponsors to support further field research and research in the search for dinosaurs.