Hesperotestudo osborniana

Not Hesperotestudo osborniana. This is Hesperotestudo osborniana (Hay, 1904), a relative — both are Testudinidae.
Yale Peabody Museum · CC0 · via GBIF. May be a photograph of a specimen, or an artist’s reconstruction — an interpretation of a skeleton, since colour and soft tissue are almost never preserved.
On record
Recorded, not inferred- Sits inside
- HesperotestudoPBDB
- Diet
- herbivore, herbivorePBDB, for Testudinidae
- Life habit
- ground dwellingPBDB, for Testudinidae
- Motility
- actively mobilePBDB, for Osteichthyes
- Environment
- terrestrialPBDB, for Testudinidae
Time the record covers
At least 9.1 million years on record.
The record covers at least 18.5 Mya to 9.4 Mya. No occurrence read is dated outside 23.1 Mya to 4.7 Mya.
5 occurrences of Hesperotestudo osborniana on record, most of them in the Miocene. Bar height is expected occurrences, not a count: each fossil is spread across the span it is dated to, so a tall narrow bar means tight dating and a low wide one means loose.
When
5 occurrencesThese are dates about fossils, not the animal: the record can only begin after it arose and end before it died out, so either end may reach further. Shares are expected occurrences: a fossil dated to a span is counted partly in each period it straddles. More on what this infers.
Found in
4 formations
- Marsland Formation · Hemingford Group2
- Pawnee Creek Formation1
- Deep River Formation1
- Loop Fork Formation1
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The named rock units Hesperotestudo osborniana has been recovered from, largest first. Drawn where the rock is now, not where it formed.
Hesperotestudo osborniana and its relatives
MioceneWhere Hesperotestudo osborniana and its relatives were recorded in the Miocene.
Found in the same rock
2 taxa- Gopherus edae1 site
- Procyonidae1 site
The Paleobiology Database records 5 sites for Hesperotestudo osborniana, and this reads all of them. The number is how many of those sites it was catalogued from too.
This is not a list of everything alive at the time. It is only what has come out of the same ground as this animal and been written down.
Entered from
4 references- The fossil turtles of North America2
- Turtles from the upper Harrison beds1
- Descriptions of new species of turtles of the genus Testudo, collected from the Miocene by the Carnegie Museum; together with a description of the skull of Stylemys nebrascensis1
- A new gigantic tortoise from the Miocene of Colorado1
Each of the 5 occurrences read was entered from one of these publications, ordered by how many each accounts for. This is not a search for papers mentioning the name. Entries link to doi.org where the Paleobiology Database holds an identifier, and to its own record where it does not. Relayed as the Paleobiology Database holds them, not checked against what they resolve to.
Media and terms
Media content1

Picture of Hesperotestudo osborniana (Hay, 1904)
- Source
- GBIF
- Credit
- Yale Peabody Museum
- Licence
- CC0
- Commercial use
- the licence allows it
No 3D scan of Hesperotestudo osborniana was found in Sketchfab.
Smithsonian Open Access and MorphoSource were not reached for this taxon, so this list is what the others held rather than everything there is.
This is what the site found, which is not the same as what exists.
Keep going
What may have been alongside itHesperotestudo through timeFormations of the MioceneThe world it lived on
Occurrence data from the Paleobiology Database, CC BY 4.0. (Hay 1904)