No, it wasn't for armor. At least not initially. WorldTurtleDay
Turtle shells didn’t get their start as natural armor, it seems. The reptiles’ ancestors might have, new research suggests. Only later did the hard body covering become useful for protection.
The findings might also help explain how turtles’ ancestors survived a mass extinction 250 million years ago that wiped out most plants and animals on earth, scientists report online July 14 inMost shelled animals, like armadillos, get their shells by adding bony scales all over their bodies. Turtles, though, form shells by gradually broadening their ribs until the bones fuse together.
It’s an unusual mechanism, says Tyler Lyson, a paleontologist at the Denver Museum of Nature and Science who led the study. Thicker ribs don’t offer much in the way of protection until they’re fully fused, as they are in modern turtles. And the modification makes critical functions like moving and breathing much harder — a steep price for an animal to pay. So Lyson suspected there was some advantage other than protection to the partial shells.
He and his colleagues examined fossils from prototurtles, focusing on an ancient South African reptile calledshared many characteristics with animals that dig and burrow, the researchers found. The reptile had huge claws and large triceps in addition to thickened ribs.had thickened ribs and powerful forelimbs and claws — all of which possibly helped it dig. In today’s turtles, those ribs fuse to form shells.
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