FOSSILS ET AL.

What Happens When a Hundred Million Years Meets a Century of Humans?

How sea turtles went from surviving mass extinctions to struggling against us

Image from CANVA

Imagine a creature so resilient it swam alongside dinosaurs, outlived multiple ice ages, and watched oceans rise and fall for over a hundred million years.

That is the story of sea turtles. These gentle navigators of the oceans are more than charismatic marine reptiles. They are living links to Earth’s deep past, carrying forward a legacy that began in the Cretaceous. And yet, despite their endurance through natural catastrophes, they now face the greatest challenge of all: us.

Sea turtles first appeared in the fossil record during the early Cretaceous, about 110 million years ago. They belong to the larger turtle lineage, the order Testudines, which traces back to the Triassic period, around 220 million years ago, and also includes tortoises.

Early fossils such as Odontochelys from China and Proganochelys from Germany reveal the first experiments in building shells, marking the origin of one of evolution’s most successful body plans.

One of the most striking fossil sea turtles is Archelon, from the late Cretaceous, and discovered in South Dakota’s…