Paleontologists working in South America have described an ancient sea turtle that could be the key to understanding the murky evolutionary history of turtles, and it is at least 25 million years older than any other sea turtle fossil known. Edwin Cadena of the Senckenberg Naturmuseum in Germany and James Parham of California State University Fullerton unveiled a new species of a nearly 2 meter-long marine turtle in the latest issue of PaleoBios named Desmatochelys padillai from the Lower Cretaceous (120 million years old) of Colombia that sheds light on the mysterious origins of marine turtles and their confusing relationships to living sea turtles.

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