The Turtle Papers

The history of Desmatochelys is a very well-documented one, with many of the fossils described and analyzed a variety of ways. Some of these descriptions of course include Williston 1894 and Cadena and Parham, 2015. The Cadena and Parham article is fairly long and highly detailed and, thankfully for us, hosted online by the University of California system; the article appeared in PaleoBios which is published by the University of California Museum of Paleontology. A lot of this article discusses the phylogenetics of marine turtles and these sections are accompanied by enormous colorful figures and phylogenetic trees. Much of the discussion contained therein is the result of studies that came before Cadena and Parham, allowing these authors to make the inferences that they detail in their article. Many of those arguments and discussions were originally written by Elizabeth Nicholls in the early 1990's. Nicholls, 1992 detailed an incomplete specimen of D. lowi discovered on Vancouver Island on the Pacific coast of Canada. That specimen marked the first discovery of a marine vertebrate from the Cretaceous along the Pacific coast. In her discussion of turtle specimens Nicholls argued that more specimens of marine turtles discovered in Cretaceous rocks belonged to the genus Desmatochelys and her work on the turtles is inherent in the efforts and descriptions of later marine turtles and Desmatochelys specimens specifically.