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Journal of Paleontology

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SHARK-BITTEN PROTOSTEGID TURTLES FROM THE UPPER CRETACEOUS MOOREVILLE CHALK, ALABAMA

¹ Environmental Science Program and Department of Biological Sciences, DePaul University, 2325 North Clifton Avenue, Chicago, Illinois 60614, <kshimada@depaul.edu>
² Sternberg Museum of Natural History, Fort Hays State University, Hays, Kansas 67601
³ Department of Natural Sciences, Longwood University, 201 High Street, Farmville, Virginia 23909, <ehooks@longwood.edu>

The first 20% of the full text of this article appears below.

	INTRODUCTION

 
PROTOSTEGIDS ARE Cretaceous marine turtles. Fossil materials assignable to the family Protostegidae range from early Albian to Late Campanian in age and have been described from all continents except Antarctica (Hirayama, 1995). The group includes two gigantic forms, Archelon Wieland and Protostega Cope, that reached maximum carapace lengths in excess of 2 m and rank among the largest turtles that ever lived.

In this paper, we describe two specimens of Protostega gigas Cope housed in the Field Museum of Natural History (FMNH), Chicago, Illinois: FMNH P27452 and FMNH PR58. Both are from the Mooreville Chalk (Upper Santonian to Lower Campanian: Mancini et al., 1995) in Greene County, Alabama, and are noteworthy because they show tooth marks from at least one large shark. One of the specimens also exhibits five embedded teeth of the Late Cretaceous cretoxyrhinid shark Cretoxyrhina mantelli (Agassiz). This note constitutes the first report of protostegid turtles bitten by C. mantelli.

	SPECIMEN DESCRIPTIONS

 
FMNH P27452
The specimen consists of disarticulated bones of a partial skeleton. Two bones that exhibit evidence for shark biting are considered here: a nearly complete left humerus (Figs. 1.1, 2.1; also illustrated in Zangerl, 1953, fig. 49) and a left hyoplastron (Figs. 1.3, 2.2).

View larger version (127K): [in this window] [in a new window]   FIGURE 1—Photographs of two specimens of Protostega gigas with embedded Cretoxyrhina mantelli teeth and/or tooth marks from the Mooreville Chalk, Greene County, Alabama. 1, Ventral (left) and dorsal (right) views of left humerus in FMNH P27452, (distal end oriented toward the bottom; cf. Fig. 2.1); 2, close-up view (stereopair) of two tooth fragments of C. mantelli pierced in left humerus in FMNH P27452 (distal end of humerus oriented toward the bottom; see Fig. 2.1 for its location); 3, ventral view of left hyoplastron in FMNH P27452 (anterior edge . . . [Full Text of this Article]

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