Archelon
Encyclopedia : A : AR : ARC : Archelon
- ARCHELON is also a sea-turtle conservation society, see ARCHELON, the Sea Turtle Protection Society of Greece
Archelon is a genus of extinct
sea turtle, the largest that has ever lived. The largest
Archelon fossil, found in the Pierre Shale of
South Dakota in the 1970s, measures more than four and a half
meters long, and about four meters from flipper to flipper. It was a sea going turtle, related to present day
Leatherback Sea Turtles. Its fossils date to 70 million years ago in the
Cretaceous period, when a shallow sea covered most of central
North America.
The live weight of an
Archelon ischyros is estimated at more than 4,500 pounds (2200 kilograms).
External Links
References
Black hills institute of Geological Research, Inc. webpage on the Archelon
From Wikipedia, the Free Encyclopedia. Original article here. Support Wikipedia by contributing or donating.
All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License See Wikipedia Copyrights for details.
