Image right: The thick fossil carapace of a newly discovered prehistoric turtle.

Cerrejonemys wayuunaiki takes its genus name from Cerrejón, and emys—Greek for turtle. Its species name is the language spoken by the Wayuu people who live on the Guajira Peninsula in northeastern Colombia near the mine. About as thick as a standard dictionary, this turtle’s shell may have warded off attacks by the Titanoboa, thought to have been the world’s biggest snake, and by crocodile-like creatures living in its neighborhood 60 million years ago.

Image left: Carlos Jarmillo with turtle specimens in the Cerrejón coal mine.

“The fossils from Cerrejón provide a snapshot of the first modern rainforest in South America—after the big Cretaceous extinctions and before the Andes rose, modern river basins formed and the Panama land bridge connected North and South America,” explains Carlos Jarmillo, staff scientist at the Smithsonian who studies the plants from Cerrejón.

“We are still trying to understand why six of this turtle’s modern relatives live in the Amazon, Orinoco and Magdalena river basins of South America and one lives in Madagascar,” explains Edwin Cadena, first author of the study and a doctoral candidate  at North Carolina State University. This discovery “closes an important gap in the fossil record and supports the idea that the group originated near the tip of South America before the continent separated from India and Madagascar more than 90 million years ago.”

Image right: An artist’s conception of the giant prehistoric snake Titanoboa. (Illustration by Jason Bourque)

Cadena will characterize two more new turtle species and analyze the histology of fossil turtle bones from the Cerrejón site. “I hope this will give us an even better understanding of turtle diversity in the region and some important clues about the environment where they lived.”

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Photo: This fossil of Anchitherium clarencei, found in the Panama Canal earthworks, is now in the collection of the University of Florida. (Photo courtesy Aldo Rincon)

The discovery significantly extends the southern tip of the known range of this prehistoric animal, and adds to previous fossil evidence discovered in strata from roughly the same period in Florida, Nebraska and South Dakota. It is by far the most complete fossil of a horse collected at the canal site in excavations spanning the last century; characteristics such as the shape of the horse’s teeth indicate it was primarily a forest-dwelling browser. This evidence supports MacFadden’s belief that the habitat of Panama was once a mosaic of relatively dense forest and open woodlands.

The ongoing excavation of the Panama Canal waterway to make the canal wide enough for supersized cargo ships has been a dream come true for Carlos Jaramillo, senior scientist at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama, and his colleagues. Jaramillo, working with the University of Florida and the Panama Canal Authority, organized a team of researchers and students who rush in to map and collect newly exposed fossils in the canal earthworks following large dynamite blasts set off by canal excavators. It was during one of these collecting excursions that Aldo Rincon, a paleontology intern at the Tropical Research Institute, unearthed the fossil teeth of Anchitherium clarencei.

Photo: Following blasting to expand the Panama Canal, geologists and paleontologists organized by the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute rush in to map, describe and recover any fossils they can find that might reveal more about the prehistoric ecology of Panama.

The Panama Canal excavation site “is one of very few places in the tropics where we have access to fresh outcrops before they are washed away by torrential rains or overgrown by vegetation,” Jaramillo says.

“We expect the fossils that we have been salvaging to resolve some major scientific mysteries, such as: What geological forces combined to create the Panama land bridge? Was the flora and fauna in Panama before the land bridge closed similar to that in North America, or did it include other elements?”

So far, 10 million cubic meters of earth have been removed from the Canal. The pace of operations is about to accelerate as the Canal Authority awards the final bids for the construction of a third set of locks. More information on the Panama Canal Geology Project is available at striweb.si.edu/jaramillo/current_research/index.html.

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Wing headed an international team of scientists whose discovery of plant fossils in the Bighorn Basin of northwestern Wyoming helps document the consequences of a sudden global warming, called the Paleocene-Eocene Thermal Maximum (PETM), 55 million years ago.

Experts believe the PETM, which was caused by a massive release of carbon into the atmosphere, may be an analogue for what is happening today as humans burn increasing amounts of fossil fuel and release large amounts of carbon dioxide.

Plant Movement Signals Global Warming
For nearly 15 years, Wing and his team dug through sediments deposited during uplift of the Rocky Mountains, looking for fossils of the right age and condition. Their discoveries proved that warming caused major shifts in the distribution of plants, allowing southern-dwelling trees and shrubs, related to poinsettia, sumac, and paw-paw, to move some 1,000 miles north in less than 10,000 years. These subtropical invaders flourished for about 100,000 years in what we now know as Wyoming. As carbon dioxide levels dropped and temperatures cooled again, plants related to birches and bald cypress came to dominate the vegetation.

The study and interpretation of this fossil record helps other scientists project future changes in plant life that may result from global warming induced by human activity.

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