Touren Pope has a claim to fame few other 11-year-olds do: discovering a roughly 50-million-year-old turtle. Pope lives in Nevada, but was visiting his grandparents, when they went rock hunting in southwest Wyoming. They were poking around some fossilized clam shells when, as Pope tells it, he got bored and started walking around.
“Then I just spot this weird rock that I thought I just wanted to throw it up into the air. So instead, I didn’t – I found a fossilized turtle,” he said.
Pope and his grandparents texted a picture of the find to Pope’s mother, Tessa Patterson. Patterson said her parents are rockhounds – amateur geologists and collectors – so they’ve seen some cool stuff. But the turtle was something special.
“It blew all of our minds. We’re like, ‘What is this?’” said Patterson.
As is required when finding potential vertebrate fossils on BLM land, Pope and his grandparents left it where they found it and notified the Bureau of Land Management. Experts then returned to where Pope found the weird rock to confirm that the discovery was indeed a fossil. J.P. Cavigelli is a museum specialist at the Tate Geological Museum in Casper, the turtle’s new home, and was part of the excavation team.
“Within a few minutes, we could tell it was a pretty complete turtle shell and worth collecting,” he said.
The turtle shell was found in a roughly 50-million-year-old rock layer known as the Bridger Formation. Cavigelli said the formation is mostly exposed in southwestern Wyoming.
“It’s kind of bluish and brownish sandstones and blue mudstones that make some pretty extensive badlands,” he said.
Cavigelli said the ancient reptile was likely a softshell turtle, which means the top shell is not connected to the bottom shell and the shell itself is softer, flatter and more flexible. The softshell turtle family is still around today, and the ancient turtle probably looked quite a bit like its modern descendants.
“Let’s say you were experienced in looking at softshell turtles in Florida or Louisiana, and you came out here, time traveled, went back 50 million years – you would be able to say, ‘That is a softshell turtle,’” said Cavigelli.
Wyoming looked very different when the ancient turtle roamed. Craig Thomas is an archaeologist and paleontology field coordinator for the BLM Rock Springs Field Office. He said Wyoming 50 million years ago was hot and muggy. Thomas compared it to coastal North Carolina, while others said Florida’s Everglades might be a good parallel.
“You had lots of rivers and streams. You had lakes,” said Thomas. “Lots of wildlife and turtles, crocodiles, large mammals, tiny mammals, monkeys in the trees – that kind of stuff.”
Thomas said the shell’s dark color indicates it probably just started to come out of the ground when Pope found it.
“If we don’t find them in time, they tend to degrade rapidly when they reach the surface,” said Thomas.
Thomas explained that water can trickle into the shell and cause the minerals to expand. This makes the shell shatter into fragments when it reaches the surface – a process he referred to as a “turtle splat”. Thomas was excited about such a complete shell, a feeling Cavigelli echoed.
“The most exciting thing about it is that it's a complete shell, and that’s very good,” Cavigelli said.
Pope and his grandparents got to join the excavation team in the field and helped safely transport the shell. This was particularly exciting for Pope because he has always loved science, especially paleontology. Some favorites in his personal collection include a Tyrannosaurus rex tooth and the skull of a baby Tyrannosaurus rex. Pope handcrafts books about dinosaurs, compiling facts and figures from around the world in his own notebooks.
“The reason why I think the past is cooler is because they, if you think about it, were actually smarter than us,” said Pope. “They were able to build things out of wood that actually looked cool, worked better, and harder to be destroyed and easier to be fixed.”
Pope said the discovery hasn’t really changed his relationship to science, but it’s definitely made him known to more people in the paleontological community.
“I’m now more visible,” he said.
Pope got to name the turtle. He chose “Little Timmy”.
Thomas said Pope and his grandparents finding the shell shows how everyone can be involved in paleontology, especially on public lands.
“These fossils on public land, they ultimately belong to the American people,” he said. “Through their outreach, they were able to save the specimen. So it can be observed, it can be analyzed, and maybe displayed and appreciated by all.”
The shell is currently being prepared by Cavigelli and his team at the Tate Geological Museum.
