The 150-million-year-old turtle fossil discovered was the first to survive as a whole.

An incredibly well-preserved fossil of an ancient Jurassic sea turtle has been found in Germany. This is notable as the first fossil to have a complete skull, shell and four limbs. The sea turtle had a huge head and was swimming in the shallows of a tropical sea that once covered Europe 150 million years ago.

There are some extremely important fossil sites around the world that provide scientists with a series of examples that help determine all sorts of information about how ancient creatures once roamed the land and seas of the ancient Earth. The Torleite Formation near Painten in southeastern Germany is one of them. In addition to being an active quarry, this area is home to hundreds of fossil Jurassic sea creatures such as turtles, crocodiles, fish and even giant marine reptiles such as ichthyosaurs and plesiosaurs.

Scientists unearthed a new specimen of the tortoise species Solnhofia parsonsi here in 2014, dating back about 150 million years. This area is known as the Franconian Alb and contains large amounts of marine sedimentary rocks from the Lower and Upper Jurassic. The site of the turtle specimen has only been explored in the last 20 years and has yielded a large number of specimens from different taxonomic groups. The diversity in the samples led scientists to suggest that this region was once connected to the open sea.

The new specimen is tremendously preserved, with a complete skull and visible skeleton. “Compared to the size of its shell, the skull is very large, reaching about 40% of the shell length,” the authors write in the study.

However, it is only possible to look down from the top of the shell. This is the first fossil with a complete skull, shell, and nearly all limbs, and only the second of this species to have head and hind limbs in their natural positions, helping the team understand more about the turtles’ behavior.

The team thinks that the fact that the turtle’s fins are different from the hard fins of deep-sea turtles indicates that the turtle did not have a purely pelagic (open sea) lifestyle and therefore did not spend much time in the open sea. Instead, they suggest, the fin formation combined with a difference in tail length indicates that this turtle’s ecology is more suited to being a shallow-water coastal marine species.

The study was published in PLOS ONE.