Turtle Lineage Comes Out of Its Shell

A painted turtle. (Photo by Daniel Field)

Daniel Field, a Predoctoral Fellow at the National Museum of Natural History (NMNH), and his research team have just published a paper on their new discovery about the evolution of turtles.

Turtles have long been the subject of one the most contentious questions in evolutionary biology: where do they fit among vertebrates in the evolutionary tree of life? Now, in a new study in the journal Evolution & Development scientists have determined that turtles are more closely related to birds and crocodilians than to lizards and snakes. The study is based on the combined data from anatomical, DNA and microRNA studies.

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