The Patient: Pappochelys rosinae
Sometimes it can be a good investment to excavate in long-known quarries. For instance, a highly unexpected find was made in a limestone quarry near Vellberg, when our palaeontological team excavated Pappochelys rosinae, later referred to as Grandpa Turtle. This 30 cm long reptile is dwarfed by its 3–6 m long contemporaries, giant amphibians and large carnivorous reptiles. In a sample of thousands of bones, the skeletal remains of Grandpa Turtle form rare but unspectacular picks.
Pappochelys was first reported in 2015 and fully described in 2018, when its complete skeleton became known. Its discovery yielded many new and some highly perplexing details on the origin of turtles. Together with the geologically younger stem-turtles Odontochelys and Eorhynchochelys, it helped to solve the century-old mystery of turtle origins.
In life, Grandpa Turtle must have appeared like a small, stout lizard, but its skeleton clearly reveals a suite of turtle features: short and broadened ribs as forerunners of the back shell (carapace), shoulder blade rod-like, trunk vertebrae reduced to nine, and a range of thickend bony rods that would later fuse to form the belly shell (plastron). Contrasting later turtles, Pappochelys retained regular teeth and a delicate skull, much like that of modern tuataras and iguanas.
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Archaeologists increasingly use paleopathology as an important tool for understanding the lives of ancient peoples as they discover the high incidence of diseases in the early inhabitants, especially in the cases where such diseases left their mark on the bone as they establish the presence of diseases and their dynamic impact on human groups through inferences made based on evidence gathered from archeological human remains.