Chang-Fu Zhou‡, Wen-Hao Wu§, Márton Rabi|© Chang-Fu Zhou, Wen-Hao Wu, Márton Rabi. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (CC BY 4.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Citation:
Zhou C-F, Wu W-H, Rabi M (2019) Presence of the Jehol Biota turtle Ordosemys liaoxiensis in the Early Cretaceous Hengtongshan Formation of southern Jilin Province, China. Fossil Record 22(2): 57-64. https://doi.org/10.5194/fr-22-57-2019 |  |
Recently, a vertebrate assemblage of the Jehol Biota has been reported fromthe Early Cretaceous Hengtongshan Formation of Xingling Town, Meihekou City,Jilin Province, China. It is dominated by the fishes Lycoptera and Sinamia and the sinemydidturtle Ordosemys. Here, we describe the turtle specimens and referral to Ordosemys liaoxiensis, otherwiseknown from the older Yixian Formation of the Jehol Biota. It is characterizedby a subcircular shell, wide vertebral scales, well-developed plastralfenestrae, and a major contribution from the xiphiplastra to enclose thehypo-xiphiplastral fenestra. As the first Mesozoic turtle of Jilin Province,this record represents the first tetrapod to indicate the presence of theJehol Biota in the region. Given the geographic and temporal distance fromthe Yixian Formation, future collections from the Hengtongshan Formationhave good potential for evaluating spatiotemporal patterns of the JeholBiota.