SCIENCE: Venezuela Recovers Five-Million-Year-Old Turtle from US

By IPS Correspondents Reprint | | Print |

Andrés Cañizález

CARACAS, Feb 18 2002 (IPS) - The only shell of what is considered the largest species of turtle that ever lived is on display in Venezuela, along with another 111 fossils, after a 30-year sojourn in the United States.

The Uruma shell, 2.3 metres long and 1.9 metres wide, was found by Venezuelan and U.S. scientists in northwestern Venezuela in 1972. “Stupendemys geographicus” is the scientific name of the species, which went extinct around five million years ago, during the Miocene era.

The giant turtle shell and most of the other fossils brought back to Venezuela on Feb 1 were put on display Sunday in the Caracas Science Museum, which since 1999 was working on recuperating the fossils from Harvard University.

The name Uruma came from Urumaco, the site north of the city of Coro where the shell was found.

The name of the species is a combination of “stupendous” and “National Geographic”, which financed the research carried out in Venezuela, said U.S. zoologist and researcher Roger Wood, who as a student took part in the 1972 dig.

The fossils found in the region of Urumaco came from animals of enormous proportions that lived in the Cenozoic era.

At the time the shell was discovered, Venezuela lacked the academic specialists and infrastructure for identifying fossils, which were thus taken to Harvard.

But in 1999, Venezuelan authorities began working on recovering Uruma and the rest of the fossils, which led to collaboration between the Caracas Science Museum and the Harvard Museum of Comparative Zoology.

Due to their antiquity and the uniqueness of some of the pieces, the recovered fossils, which date back to the Tertiary period, are of invaluable significance in understanding the past and orienting future research, said Wood.

The Caracas Science Museum’s efforts to recover the fossils arose from scientific as well as social motives, said the musuem’s director, Sergio Antillano.

“Venezuelan society perceives itself as having a very recent past,” and is ignorant of its own past, while it sees “Europe and Africa as millenial places with long histories,” said Antillano.

For that reason, the museum will first exhibit Uruma and a large number of the pieces that were in the United States in Caracas, before taking them on a tour of other Venezuelan cities, said the official.

The idea is to “disseminate the knowledge provided by these fossils, and educate the public, while promoting an understanding and appreciation of our national heritage,” said Antillano, who became director of the museum in 1995 with an aim to “popularise” science in this South American oil-producing country of 23 million.

The research project that led to the discovery of Uruma was aimed at studying the fauna of the late Tertiary period in several spots in South America, and establishing the differences with respect to modern-day fauna.

The investigations have shown that Uruma was an aquatic turtle, although it is not clear whether it lived in salt or freshwater.

There is some evidence that northwestern Venezuela, where Uruma was found, formed part of a delta into which today’s Orinoco river ran. Further research on the shell could provide more conclusive information.

According to the Caracas Science Museum, the Arrau or Orinoco turtle is the modern-day species most closely related to the giant Uruma, which reached a length of 10 feet and weighed up to 4,000 pounds.

The Arrau turtle, the females of which species reach 90 cms in length, is the largest freshwater turtle in Venezuela, a country that is home to a large variety of turtles.

Seven of the 12 existing families of turtles can be found in Venezuela, and 27 of the more than 200 species identified so far have been found here.