The remains of the fossil, which consisted part of its lower jaw, were found by gold miners at the “Taquaras” quarry in Porto Velho, Brazil.
Meet Peltocephalus maturin, an extinct giant turtle that was named after Maturin, a turtle character created by novelist Stephen King.
The turtle is said to be between 40,000 and 9,000 years old (at the end of the Pleistocene period) and was found in the Brazilian Amazon. The shell length of Maturin is estimated to have been nearly 6 ft. in carapace length, or about 180 cm, making it one of the largest freshwater turtles to have roamed the earth.
“We named the new species after the giant turtle ‘Maturin’, an overarching protagonist in the Stephen King multiverse. “Maturin is responsible for the creation of the universe in King’s novels and films,” Dr. Gabriel S. Ferreira of the Senckenberg Center for Human Evolution and Palaeoenvironment at the University of Tübingen said in a press release put out by the university. “Such large animals are most recently known primarily from the Miocene, the period around 23 to five million years ago.”
The remains of the fossil, which consisted part of its lower jaw, were found by gold miners at the “Taquaras” quarry in Porto Velho, Brazil. The scientists believe that Peltocephalus maturin is related to the modern day big-headed Amazon turtle (Peltocephalus dumerilianus). But maturin is four times the size of the modern day relative. The scientists believe the turtle is an omnivore. They also believe the turtle coexisted with early humans of the Amazon region around 12,600 years ago.
The complete paper, “The latest freshwater giants: a new Peltocephalus (Pleurodira: Podocnemididae) turtle from the Late Pleistocene of the Brazilian Amazon”
can be read on the Biology Letters website.
