May 31, 2013

NYIT Anatomy Professor and Team Discover the Origin of the Turtle Shell



An anatomy professor at New York Institute of Technology College of Osteopathic Medicine has contributed to a published study that provides clues on the early evolution of one of nature’s unique developments:  the turtle shell.

Assistant Professor Gaberiel Bever, Ph.D., is part of a team maintaining that the 260-million-year-old reptile from South Africa, Eunotosaurus africanus, is the earliest known version of a turtle, in part because of its distinctive T-shaped ribs. Those ribs, said Bever, represent an early step in  the evolutionary development of the carapace, the hard, upper part of the shell of today’s turtles.