From which ancestors have turtles evolved? How did they get
their shell? New data provided by the Joint International Turtle Genome
Consortium, led by researchers from RIKEN in Japan, BGI in China, and the
Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute in the UK provides evidence that turtles are
not primitive reptiles but belong to a sister group of birds and crocodiles.
The work also sheds light on the evolution of the turtle’s intriguing
morphology and reveals that the turtle’s shell evolved by recruiting genetic
information encoding for the limbs.