If it weren’t for the pig-like snout and the fact that it’s been dead for over 76 million years, it looks like any regular turtle.
The Natural History Museum of Utah recently released its study on the newly discovered species, Arvinachelys goldeni. Its unique appearance created a buzz on social media and trended on Facebook for a few days. Even more interesting than its appearance is its name, dedicated to a museum volunteer.
In Latin, “arvina” and “chelys” mean “pig fat” and “tortoise.” “Goldeni” comes from Jerry Golden, a volunteer since 1997 who has dedicated roughly 8,000 hours to the museum. Golden prepared the initial specimen, removing the rock around the bone and gluing pieces together.
Joshua Lively, a doctoral candidate at the University of Texas, studied the specimen when he was working on his master’s at the U. Lively wrote the paper on Arvinachelys goldeni and he was the one who named it.
“One of the things I wanted to do … was to highlight the importance of volunteers and citizen science to what we do in paleontology,” Lively said.
Randall Irmis, curator of paleontology, said approximately 75 people volunteer for the department and work around 15,000 hours annually, doing everything from digging up fossils to preparing them for study.
Irmis said he thinks naming the discovery after Golden, was “phenomenal.”
“Our volunteers are a crucial part of our team, we could not do the research and field work that we do without our awesome volunteers,” Irmis said.
Paleontologists discovered the turtle in 2009 and officially introduced it last month. Irmis said this gap between discovery and announcement is common because it takes researchers time to prepare and study the specimen fully.
Around 65 million years ago, the climate of Utah resembled Louisiana — wet and warm all year round. Lively said by analyzing this turtle fossil, which is very different from both its modern and contemporary relatives, they hope to discover how evolution reacts to exceptionally warm climates.
Lively said, with the exception of this find, turtles haven’t changed much over their evolutionary history. As researchers have nothing to compare it with, they don’t know what advantage the snout gave it in its environment.
“Evolution does weird and wonderful things, so over the millions of years you see lots of different weird experiments in animals,” Irmis said.
The turtle is currently the museum’s “Fossil of the Month,” and on display in the window of paleontology collections.
@EhmannKy