Extinct Giant Turtle sized skeleton found near Pacific

A turtle which was considered to be extinct almost 50000 years ago has left behind his skeleton to let the researches know that we also lived here!

This turtle was 11 feet long and 7 feet wide. Holy cow, this is huge.

The researches are trying to conclude that the date which was fixed for the extinction of the turtle might be wrong adding it may have lived until few hundreds of years ago.

The researches found the bones in 3,000-year-old archaeological site on Vanuatu belonging to a previously-undescribed species of meiolaniid, a turtle family that evolved 50 million years ago and resembled walking fortresses.

“This group of turtles is not known to have survived into the presence of humans. Now we can say that they met,” said paleontologist Trevor Worthy of Australia’s University of New South Whales.

“In Australia, these turtles survived from the time of dinosaurs, through the Pleistocene. Then humans arrived. And then there weren’t turtles anymore. I’d have thought humans had something to do with it, but there was no evidence,” said Worthy.

The bones of the newly discovered species, named Meiolania damelipi and described Aug. 16 in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences,gives us a clear picture on the ancestor turtle. They were found in a mound of animal bones discarded near a village of Lapita, a seafaring culture that 3,500 years ago spread east across Polynesia, Melanesia and Micronesia. The bottom layer of the garbage pile, dated to 3,000 years ago, had many meiolaniid bones. The top layer, dated to 2,800 years ago, had none.

Worthy estimates that Vanuatu could have supported tens of thousands of M. damelipi, but in just 200 years they were gone. And if giant land turtles were on Vanuatu, they were likely found on other Pacific islands, and hunted into oblivion.

This fits a pattern of human-preceded extinction recorded worldwide in large animals — collectively known as Pleistocene megafauna — but especially pronounced in the South Pacific, where every populated island lost between 30 and 50 percent of all animal species. These included giant iguanas, terrestrial crocodiles and dozens of birds. Bones of other now-extinct avian species were also found in the Vanuatu heap.

In tandem with these extinctions, the Lapitan culture seems to have vanished. Their distinctive ornate pottery, found across the western Pacific, disappears from the archaeological record.

As for whether there’s a lesson to be learned, “I would have thought the lessons would have been learned already,” said Worthy. “But people seem to be kind of slow catching on.”